


The Prisoner's Dilemma

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [18]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 02:18:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 47,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6685306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That's it. Cassie's out. All the fighting, all the killing, and they can never be sure if they've made any kind of difference or, if they did, whether good or bad. Enough is enough. </p><p>But no sooner has she quit than disaster strikes, and the universe throws one last mission in Cassie's lap. A mission with one little girl, and one last enemy that must die for the safety of everyone she cares about. One last execution. </p><p>With nowhere to go and no Animorphs to back her up, Cassie must decide just how important her morals are. In a war between galactic forces with no easy answers, what price is too high for safety?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> HOO BABY HERE WE GO
> 
> This is the last installment in the first of four planned phase, what I've been calling the Lag Phase. Following this we have a three-month hiatus (because, to be perfectly honest, my buffer just ran out), followed by the first CYOA and then straight into the Log Phase with the initiation of the David arc. This was also my favourite to write so I'm curious (and very nervous) to hear what you guys think.
> 
> Much thanks to JustAnotherGhostwriter, who has generously loaned her awesome betaing skills and general support to this project from start to finish and without whom this would almost certainly not exist (and would certainly be much worse), and Pawnofanellimist, as well as my innumerable temporary beta readers. Also thanks to Featherquillpen, who came up with the series title.

“You can't be serious,” Jake said, staring at me. He wasn't the only one – Marco was sitting bolt upright on his bale of hay to stare, Rachel's look was more of a glare but just as disbelieving, and Ax had actually put down the pen he was chewing on. Tobias, of course, stared at everything. He didn't bother morphing for barn meetings – a hawk, unlike an andalite, was relatively easy to hide.

“Look at it this way,” I said. “Just what, exactly, have we accomplished in this little crusade?”

“We've made them scared,” Jake said.

“Slowed them down,” Marco added.

“Fought back,” Rachel scowled.

“Scared them? Slowed them down? We're an inconvenience at most. Sure, we tick off Visser Three a lot, but so does everything, I think. No. What we've accomplished with these powers is to kill a whole lot of people. With teeth, with blades, with claws. And we've all been kind of assuming that a body count translates into victory against the yeerks, but I'm not sure that's true. Even if the end _can_ justify the means, _has_ it? Has what we've accomplished been worth all the innocent slaves we've had to kill?”

<We've done good,> Tobias protested. <We saved Leera. We kept the Pemalite Crystal out of yeerk hands. We saved Ket and Jara and little Toby.>

“We did,” I said, inclining my head. “We made excellent shock troops for various random aliens in all of those circumstances. I'm not denying that we can do the whole shock troop thing, which is actually kind of weird now that I think about it because we were never trained for any of this. But those were other people's plans that involved us because we can shapeshift and sneak and kill people. As for our own plans? We slow them a little bit, sometimes, at huge risk and the cost of lots of innocent lives, but it's never worth it. The only thing we seem to have gotten right on our own was rescuing Ax. I can't think of anything else. Not a great track record.”

“We had some impact,” Rachel said angrily.

“At what cost? How many lives?”

“Better dead than a Controller,” Jake growled. There was a quiet fury in his eyes; not fury at me, I realised, but fury nonetheless. The muscles in his neck were taut with pain.

Irritation shot through me, reminding me somewhat jarringly of my last kill; standing above a hork-bajir, annoyed at the distraction, bringing my blade down either a moment _before_ or a moment _after_ Jake's order to break off...

I met Jake's gaze and very almost asked why, if that was the case, he hadn't killed Tom yet. But I bit back the comment at the last moment. Instead I merely cocked my head, forced back the hot anger inside me and asked, “Is it? We've made that decision, yes, because we can't afford to be caught. We can't afford to let the yeerks learn of the chee, and of where the hork-bajir are, and give them morph-capable hosts. That's not true of the people who die at our teeth and claws.”

“And this is all occurring to you now?” Marco asked, raising his eyebrows. “Right when you already want to quit? How convenient.”

“Marco,” Jake said quietly.

“No, Jake, if she wants to play moral rhetoric then fine, so do I. These people you're so insistent on protecting are aiming guns and slashing wrist-blades at us, Cassie. I know it's not their fault, but we still have to defend – ”

“They're being forced to do that because we're going out there and attacking,” I snapped. “We attack the yeerks. The yeerks throw their slaves at us. We kill them and shrug and say 'oh, well, it can't be helped'.”

“Because we're fighting for the freedom of the entire planet!” Marco snapped. “You know what? Sometimes the end does justify the means. I think saving free people is worth a handful of – ”

I slapped him. I wasn't even aware I'd done it until the sharp, hard sound of flesh on flesh registered. And I'd slapped him hard; all that time in battle without a permanent scar to show for it had left me a lot less concerned with things like subtle pressure. He blinked at me, stunned, a mark already rising on his cheek, while I got a hold on myself.

“Several of my ancestors were slaves,” I said quietly. “You want to sit there and tell me that their lives were worth less for it?”

Marco blinked. “Cassie, I didn't – that's not what I meant. You _know_ that's not what I meant.”

I turned away from him, opened my hands, appealed to the group at large. “I'm not saying the planet isn't worth saving. I'm saying what we're doing isn't saving it. Did you notice the cages?”

Jake frowned. “The what?”

“The cages. Down at the Pool. I noticed it the very first time I saw them, but I kind of... didn't think about it much, until now.” I looked around at the assembled Animorphs, waiting for one of them to see what I was getting at. They just looked puzzled.

I sighed. “The cages,” I said, “have no obvious methods of suicide prevention. If the hosts believed that death was better than fighting, they would kill themselves. I was going to when they dragged me down that pier the first time, to protect you guys. We've all made that pact, when we get captured. It's not like suicide would be hard. And maybe some of them have done it, but the ones we fight? The ones we kill? They clearly chose to live. Most of the people we kill are hork-bajir, and they're covered in blades. Do you really think it would be hard for a hork-bajir restrained only by bars to kill themselves? It's not up to _us_ to decide for _them_ what's worth living for, what's worth fighting for. What we do is murder. Say it's a necessary sacrifice for our war, sure, whatever. But don't pretend we're doing our victims a favor.”

“So that's it, then?” Marco asked, rubbing his cheek. “You're just bailing on us? Miss 'we've got to protect the planet, this fight is easily worth all our lives' has decided that the price is too high?”

“Yes. I know I can't convince any of you to stop, so you can still come to me if you need morphs or whatever; I'd rather that than you getting killed. But I'm not fighting anymore.”

“Rubbish,” Marco said.

I narrowed my eyes. “You can't convince me to – ”

“Not that. Not the quitting thing. The part where you're pretending this is all part of a logical decision.”

<You don't need to try to back-rationalise your feelings,> Tobias added. <We all know what this war does to people.>

“We know you better than that,” Rachel added. “It's not like this is the first Animorph emotional breakdown.”

“Which is _totally okay_ ,” Jake added, raising a pacifying hand. “Cassie needs a bit of time. Maybe we all need a bit of time. Things have been pretty intense lately, and we should back off a bit and see how this oatmeal thing plays out. There's no need to be slinging about accusations of murder. Let's take a few days to ourselves, maybe a week, sleep on it for a while, and then we can regroup.”

I set my jaw. He didn't get it. None of them got it. I could see why; it was hard to think of ourselves in that way. We were freedom fighters, kids who'd never asked for this but who had answered the call, who'd stood up to defend our people. Not murderers. Not even I wanted to believe that.

But reality doesn't care what you believe. And with so much power in our hands and yet so little power to help anybody, we had a responsibility to be as right as we could.

“Sleep on whatever you like,” I said testily. “It's not my problem anymore. I'm done killing.” And with that, I stalked out of the barn.

I knew they’d break up the meeting soon after I left. It was kind of hard for them to justify being there if I wasn’t. I let my anger at them simmer under my breastbone. It was better than feeling nothing. I walked into the kitchen to see my Dad sitting at the table, drinking coffee and reading a book. Mom would still be at work. He offered me a glassy smile.

“You can probably have the barn back soon,” I said. “I think they’re done.”

“Oh! Good. And how… how are you, Cassie? Everything good?”

“Yeah. I quit and…” I stopped, eyeing my father suspiciously. The smile on his face was growing more strained. His voice was too chirpy. My Dad was a lot of things, but ‘chirpy’ was not one of them. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Wrong?” he repeated.

“Yes. Wrong.” I felt a stab of fear. “Did something happen to Mom?”

“What? No! No. I just…” he looked at my face and sighed. “I was waiting for her to get home so we could tell you together, but you look kind of worried…”

“I am kind of worried. You might as well tell me.”

“Right. Okay.” He took a sip of his coffee. “You know the pet food company that provides most of our donations?”

“Yeah, pretty much every pen I’ve used in the last couple of years has their logo on it.”

“Well not any more. They… they’ve pulled out.” He took another, bigger sip of coffee.

I took a moment to process this. “Pulled out.”

“Yes. They’re not funding us anymore. They said it was no longer viable. Sweetie, we have other donors, but none that big. Without that income I… I don’t know if we can keep the Rehabilitation Clinic afloat. We’ll probably have to close it. I’m… I’m sorry, sweetie.”

I thought about this for a few moments, and then nodded. “Right. Thanks for telling me.”

“You’re not upset?”

Dad was upset. I could see it in the way his eyes wrinkled. I thought fast, composing something comforting.

“We still have the barn and equipment,” I pointed out. “That stuff isn’t worth resale. There’s no reason the Clinic can’t open again later, when things pick up. It’s just a bit of a setback.” I summoned a smile, and did a pretty good job of it, I thought.

“Right,” Dad said. “Well. We can only hope, right?”

“That’s the spirit.” I headed to my room to catch up on the huge backlog of homework that being an Animorph had left me with. It seemed like I’d done nothing but homework since our last battle, and I still had some left. I kept my window shut and pulled the blinds to avoid being annoyed by intrusive red-tailed hawks and got to work hating my sadistic teachers and their love of really difficult homework questions.

Just like a normal teenager.


	2. Chapter 2

None of the Animorphs went out of their way to talk to me at school the next day. Whether they didn’t want to see me or they were respecting my wish not to see them, I didn’t know. Lunch tasted like the same cheap slop as always, with no sign that it was secretly spiked with instant maple and ginger oatmeal extract.

I still didn’t understand how a drug could make yeerks independent of Kandrona rays even after they stopped taking it, but I pushed the thought out of my mind. There was no need to think about aliens. I’d tied up our loose ends and sent George Eidelman and the Controller we’d freed for the oatmeal mission on their way before quitting the Animorphs, so I had nothing else to do, nothing else to think about. I was done.

But as I ate I still cast an eye about, looking for anybody acting oddly, any Controllers fighting for control.

“Did you and Rachel have a fight?” somebody behind me asked.

I jumped. The speaker was Lorraine, a girl in my year. We weren’t close, but we’d been friendly enough back when I’d had time for friends. I moved my tray so she could sit.

“Why do you ask?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I just noticed you’re not sitting with your usual crew.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Hey, how have you been? It seems like forever since we’ve talked.”

“It kinda does, doesn’t it?” Lorraine grinned and told me all about how cute her new baby cousin was while I nodded, smiled, and tried to feel happy about a baby like I was supposed to. It was hard to pay attention to what she was saying when I was analysing every sentence for signs that pretty, happy Lorraine was an alien slave. The sparkle in her dark eyes looked pretty human to me. With effort, I drew a little more enthusiasm into my own smile, a little brightness into my own eyes. I made the appropriate sounds and comments. The more we talked about her family, the less I had to lie about myself.

The baby _did_ sound pretty cute.

“We should do something,” I said suddenly.

“Do something?”

“You know. Hang out.” I bit my lip awkwardly. I was definitely screwing this up. I didn’t know how to make friends. What did friends even do? Apart from drag each other through clothing shops they hated? I was pretty sure you didn’t just go up to an old acquaintance and declare an intent to hang out.

But Lorraine nodded. “I was gonna see if Emily and Max wanted to see Jeremy Jason McCole’s movie next weekend. I’m told he’s even cuter on the big screen. You interested?

I forced another smile just as the bell rang. “Sure, that sounds fun.”

I could almost make myself believe it. This ‘normal life’ stuff was easy.

After school, Rachel walked to the bus stop with me. I didn’t want her to, but her legs were longer and her steps were more graceful and it was a lot easier for her to keep whatever pace I did than for me to avoid her without making it obvious that I was doing so.

“So,” she said quietly once we were definitely alone, “have you calmed down by now?”

“Calmed down?” I asked, my voice acid. “What do you mean calmed down?”

“Clearly not. Never mind then.” Rachel slowed her pace so I could strip ahead of her. Instead, I whirled and grabbed her arm, willing her to understand.

“Rachel, I’m not just… we’ve all freaked out before, okay? I’m not just freaking out after a bad fight here. This is different. Well, it’s not different, I mean it’s something that’s been going on for a long time now, but I haven’t let myself think about it until now and…” I took a deep breath, tried to order my thoughts in a way that she would understand. “Do you remember your first kill? Not the first attacker who got hit by enemy friendly fire or something, the first one you decided to kill, and then did it?”

A shadow passed behind her eyes. “Yes.”

“Me too.” I swallowed and pushed away the memory of that hork-bajir lying on the floor of the EGS tower during our destroy-the-Kandrona mission. “Do you remember your last kill?”

“I guess? I mean, it would’ve been during the oatmeal thing a couple of days ago.”

“You guess? Do you know how many people you killed that day?”

“I don’t keep count, Cassie.”

“Me neither. They all kind of blend together after a while, don’t they? They stop being people, they stop mattering.” I shook my head. “It’s not just them. Nothing matters any more. I go down there, and I kill, and I feel nothing. We pull off the oatmeal thing and things look to be going great, and I feel nothing. My Dad tells me the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic is closing, and again… I feel nothing. All I seem to feel these days are rage and pain and fear, and sometimes I wonder if I’m even feeling those or just remembering what they feel like. And if one day I might forget.” There were tears in my eyes, although I had no idea what had summoned them. “I can’t do that, Rachel. I can’t balance life and death on a daily basis, be judge and executioner and freedom fighter, and not feel anything. It gets worse with every battle and I can’t… I can’t trust myself anymore. You have to understand.” I searched Rachel’s face for some sign that she did understand, but she was impassive. I looked deep into those eyes wishing that right then I had the eyes of an osprey, or the strange edge-detecting vision of a Leeran, or the hologram-penetrating abilities of a huntsman spider, anything that could show me some scrap of my friend behind that face. But Rachel gave nothing away, or at least nothing that my pathetic human sight could detect.

Until eventually, she stood back. “I understand, Cassie. I understand very well. I understand that you think that after all this time fighting together, after you drag my friends and my father and who-knows-who-else into this, after all your speeches about how irrelevant our lives are in comparison to humanity and how we’re obligated to throw ourselves into this war, you’ve decided that the entire human race can go to hell… so long as _you_ don’t have to turn into _me_.”

I tried to object, but she was already stalking off.

“She’ll get over it,” a voice said behind me. For the second time that day, I jumped. I hadn’t heard Jake approaching. It was probably a good thing I wasn’t an Animorph any more, if I wasn’t going to keep alert. I spun to face him, hurriedly brushing the tears out of my eyes first.

“She doesn’t understand,” I said.

“She doesn’t _agree_ ,” Jake countered.

“Whatever.” I shrugged. I didn’t have to explain myself to him. I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone. “I think everyone thinks I’m just going to be like ‘oh, hey, I had a bad day, let’s get back to the killing.’ But I’m serious, Jake.”

“I know you’re stress – ”

“I’m not just _stressed_. I need you to take me seriously.” I met his eyes. He didn’t look away. He searched my expression with a gaze a lot older than his fourteen years. When had he started looking so old?

“If you’re serious,” he told me, putting a hand on my shoulder as if he didn’t even realise he was doing it, “don’t morph. When we morph, we can be caught. It’s a big risk. That risk is acceptable if you’re fighting. But if you’re out, you’re out. Don’t morph.”

I almost told him that my ability to morph didn’t belong to him, that there was so much good to be accomplished with it, but he was right. Prince Elfangor had given us that power as a weapon. He had trusted us to fight with it. I knew how much of a taboo… well, I didn’t know enough about andalite culture to have proper context, but I knew that what he’d done was a taboo, a very serious one. I wouldn’t risk the people using that gift properly by using it improperly.

So I nodded. “I won’t morph.”

He squeezed my shoulder. “Good luck, Cassie.”

“When you need animal advice…”

“We know who to go to.” He gave me a small smile, one without any feeling in it, and turned to walk away.

It only really hit me right then. It wasn’t just that the Animorphs were mad at me for not wanting to fight. Rachel wasn’t just offended, Marco didn’t just think I was a coward. The truth was that while Rachel still had gymnastics and Marco still tried to get random girls to go out with him and Jake still played basketball with his old friends sometimes, those things had seemed to become more and more of a chore as the fight went on, a way to maintain their cover and deflect suspicion. Animorphs didn’t just hang out without making a deliberate, conscious effort to do so. Animorphs didn’t have time for friends who weren’t Animorphs.

We might try to stay close, to see each other. But I was going to lose Rachel. I was going to lose Jake. I was going to lose Marco’s sharp mind and wit, Tobias’ calming wisdom, Ax’s fascinating perspective. They would fight fights and bleed on each other and share nightmares that I didn’t. I guess not having new nightmares is a good thing, but I’d had nobody else for so long…

I almost ran after Jake, grabbed his arm, told him it was all a joke. What was I doing? I couldn’t quit! Who would I be, without the war, without my friends, without morphing? I couldn’t not be Cassie anymore! I clamped down on the stupid, selfish urge and stood still until Jake was out of sight.

Then I went to catch the bus home.

I had chores to do in the barn, but I couldn’t face them right then. I hadn’t quite gotten used to the idea that the patients inside would be the last of our patients. Instead, I decided to go clean the horse trough, a job I’d been putting off but that really needed to be done. I dumped off my school stuff in the empty house (Mum was still at work and Dad was probably off at some meeting or other trying to save the Clinic) and trudged out to the field.

The trough was somewhat obscured by the shade tree, and I noticed the horse standing over it a long time before I realised it was blue and oddly shaped. As soon as I recognised who it was, I broke into a jog. Ax was critically eyeing the water trough which, I noticed as I approached, was clean and brimming with fresh water.

“You cleaned it!” I said with a grin. “Thank you.”

<It was no problem.>

“Thanks,” I said again. “I know you’re probably angry at me and all that.”

<Angry? No. I thought your decision was very wise.>

I blinked at him. “Really? Aren’t you andalites all into courage and warrior’s honor and stuff?”

<Yes, those things are important. But you are a female.>

I frowned. “Is this a ‘girls are too weak to fight’ thing? Because if Rachel hears you talking like that – ”

<No, I apologise; I misspoke. I sometimes forget that even with our specialised translation technology, the cultural implications of words are not always correctly interpreted. I meant to say that there are two types of people; the protectors and defenders, and the managers and maintainers. Both are vital for safety and stability. Among andalites, males are the first kind, and females the second. I know that with humans, it is not so clear-cut, but people like Rachel and Prince Jake are the first, and you are the second. I think it is wise of you to recognise this, and I could no more expect you to battle than I would expect it of an andalite female.>

I nodded, more in acknowledgement of what he’d said than in agreement. I didn’t know enough about andalites to know if the sexes really did have such different abilities or if Ax was just sexist. I was also pretty sure that the difference between manager and defender was nothing more than an andalite cultural thing; I’d seen plenty of humans switch between the two with no trouble. It may or may not apply to andalites, but it certainly didn’t apply to me.

“Right,” I said. “Thanks, Ax. I’ll see you around.”

<Indeed. I hope you are well, Cassie.> He touched two fingers lightly to my temple, then turned and headed back toward the forest.

I watched him go. Of all the people to understand, I hadn’t expected it to be the andalite.

As I passed the barn on my way back to the house, I felt the hairs prickle on the back of my neck. I’d been an Animorph long enough to know when I was being watched. I stopped to knock mud off my boots, casually scanning the area, careful not to let my eyes alight for too long on the bush that wasn’t swaying quite the way that the breeze should push it. I thought quickly. I’d just left Ax, and Tobias was too good a scout to be seen if he didn’t want to be. Rachel would just come up and confront me, even if Jake had ordered her not to. So either Jake or Marco, then, and if it was Marco, he was definitely on Jake’s orders – he wasn’t the type to secretly follow a sister-in-arms around of his own volition. And Jake had given such a genuine impression that he trusted me. I guess we were all getting pretty good at lying.

I considered stomping over to confront the spy, and decided against it. That wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have right then. I tried not to give any indication that I’d noticed them and headed inside to do some normal chores before Mom got home. Maybe wash some dishes or something.

Not being an Animorph anymore had seemed like a way out, but I was starting to wonder just what I was supposed to do instead. The Earth was still in danger, the war was still happening. I couldn’t just… go back to not knowing those things. The DNA of several of my evolutionary cousins slumbered inside me, along with a few species I had no evolutionary connection to at all. The universe I’d wanted to understand, to know so much about, was still out there, full of lifeforms I’d never dreamed of a couple of years ago. I couldn’t just… I couldn’t just be like, ‘oh, well, I don’t like this invasion so I’m going to pretend none of you exist’. And I couldn’t pretend that my own past, my own deeds, didn’t exist either.

I ran my hands down my arms, where a couple of minutes of concentration could draw hork-bajir blades through my skin if I desired it. Nothing but a promise to my former commander stood between me and being pretty much anything I wanted. I remembered those blades stained with blood, fresh blood pouring down arms already so coated in the blood of others that I couldn’t really feel it, couldn’t really tell if it had started to pour before or after the call to retreat. I didn’t know if I’d obeyed that order or not, if I’d killed during the fight or after. I didn’t know if I was a true murderer.

And the world was still in trouble. How was I supposed to save it without morphing? Without killing? Without the Animorphs? Somewhere along the line it seemed like we’d almost forgotten that the war was impossible, almost convinced ourselves that with each other, we could do anything. I didn’t know what Cassie, just Cassie, could do. I couldn’t even really warn people without morphing, it would be much too dangerous. I could only watch and wait.

I wasn’t paying enough attention to my job, and managed to slice my finger open in a knife I was washing. I went to morph the cut away and stopped myself. No; if I wasn’t going to morph, I wasn’t going to morph. Instead I went for the first aid kit. I was surprised I even remembered where it was.

Dad came home to find me sitting at the table and just kind of staring at the plaster on my finger, like its existence was a strange puzzle I couldn’t figure out.

“Cassie?” he asked.

I jumped. “I'm fine!” I said reflexively.

“You look worried.” He glanced at my thumb. “How bad is it?”

“It's fine. Just a small cut.” I tried to make my smile look relaxed. “How did your day go?”

He sighed. “I'm trying to find a new sponsor, but to be honest, it's not going well. The wildlife interest your mother's generating with the Gardens campaigns and so on is helping a little, but we're still a long way from the money we need to stay open.”

I nodded. I relaxed. A sense of comforting familiarity settled over me as I got up to draw the blinds so that Jake-or-Marco couldn't peer in and to make my father a cup of tea.

This, this hearing troubles and helping hold people together… this was my job. Morphing wasn't the only habit that died hard. My dad might not wake up screaming on a semi-regular basis or have to rip alien throats out with his teeth or constantly put his life on the line for his planet, but for now, his troubles were enough. I listened. I nodded. I offered advice and comfort when I could.

And he relaxed. He smiled. Mum came home, and we had dinner, and I listened to her talk about her day and said things that would make her feel better. And when I excused myself to get an early night, I could see the relief on their faces. They thought I was acting like a normal girl. They thought I was going to be okay. They thought that the ability to smile and listen and comfort was a genuine sign of emotional balance. They couldn't see the post-war autopilot; why would they? I was too good at my old job for that.

And I couldn't quite shake the phantom feeling of hork-bajir blood coating my arms. It wasn't the only job I was good at.


	3. Chapter 3

Going to bed early doesn’t help when you can’t sleep for the nightmares.

I forget what exactly I dreamed about. Elfangor was eaten, I think. Ax called for help and dumped computer information in my brain. Rachel sprinted towards me, eyeless and screaming with ants pouring down her face, accusing me of abandoning her, of being afraid of becoming the same. Marco called me a coward as he held his mother’s face underwater and watched her drown, and Jake grabbed my hair, forced my head up to watch Tobias soar overhead and told me it was my fault he was trapped, my fault for being stupid and impulsive and getting caught on that first mission, and then he slammed my head into the side of a table over and over again.

I don’t remember how any of those events were connected in the dream. Maybe they weren’t connected at all. I just remember Melissa Chapman’s head being forced towards the Yeerk Pool while her father wept and fought on the sidelines and his cries became the cries of my own mother right as I woke up.

I didn’t scream, so nobody came running. I just froze, heart thudding in my ears, trying to remember how to breathe properly.

When I was pretty sure I’d got the hang of it, I got up. It was only about nine thirty at night, but there was no way I was going back to sleep, no way I was going to sit alone with my thoughts in the dark, and no way I was going to break my promise to Jake and go flying. I wouldn’t break that easily. It had been less than one day.

Maybe the dreams would improve, in time. Maybe new mental scar tissue would form and the old battles would blend together and become meaningless background. Maybe not. I had no idea what I was supposed to do about them while I waited to find out. I had no idea what I was supposed to do about the invasion, either. I’d traded the guilt of a killer for the guilt of a bystander. How dare I stand by and say ‘oh, no, I can’t help you guys escape slavery, I can’t fight off these invaders, because the fact that I’m clearly capable of killing makes me sad’? But how could I continue if I couldn’t trust myself not to just make everything worse? If I didn’t know what I was doing any more?

My parents were still up, watching the news. There was an alert about a leopard escaping from some jerk’s private zoo that they were complaining about. Private zoos are horrible, often run by people who have no idea how to look after the exotic animals they buy. I didn’t blame the leopard and neither, judging from their dark comments, did my parents. They paid no attention as I snuck outside. The moon was bright and full and lit my way easily; I headed for the barn with the vague notion that I’d try to get some cleaning done and was halfway there before I remembered I hadn’t done that afternoon’s chores. There were animals in there that needed their meds, or their bandages changed. I huffed grumpily to myself. It wasn’t like it even mattered; the Clinic was closing down anyway. But I’d never forgotten to look after the animals before. Not changing a bandage isn’t like not cleaning a room; it’s not something you can just put off forever.

I changed bandages. I gave late meals. I pushed through various meaningless chores to shift the assemblages of meat, nerves and bone around me back into the shape that they were ‘supposed’ to be.

Stupid animals. _They_ didn’t have to worry about saving the world. All they cared about was eating and surviving and making sure their kids could do the same. It didn’t matter if they died; they didn’t have a world riding on their shoulders. They didn’t have to worry about pain and guilt and complicated moral dilemmas with no right answers and way too many wrong ones. They didn’t have to look at the blood of their victims and wonder what was murder and what was orders, because hunting wasn’t murder, it was just hunting.

The envy was like a hot feeling in my gut.

I inspected the last wound, made the last chart note, and sat back on a bale of hay. I was suddenly tired, really tired, and I didn’t have the energy to sneak back into the house. I didn’t have the energy to do anything except close my eyes and try to quiet the confused thoughts in the back of my mind.

I opened my eyes to a different quality of light and the insistent drumming of rain on the roof. I’d spent enough time out-of-doors to be able to tell that it was almost sunrise as soon as I left the barn. I had perhaps an hour before the sun came up, that meant an hour before I could expect Tobias to wake and probably an hour before Ax did, too. I had an hour, and I had a plan. I had a way out.

I was stupid. I was selfish. I knew that. I just didn’t know what choice was more stupid and selfish; fighting, or not fighting. I couldn’t live with being an Animorph. I couldn’t live with not being an Animorph. I couldn’t live with the guilt. I couldn’t deal with my responsibility to know the world and my responsibility to save the world and having no idea why any of it even mattered any more. Leaving the Animorphs was no escape. Then I just had to deal with not being an Animorph. I didn’t think Jake really understood what he was asking of me when he asked me not to morph. Why had I even tried to obey? There was no way I could handle anything without the comfort of subsuming my mind into that of a simpler animal, with more immediate, defined needs.

But there was a way out, wasn’t there? I’d seen it start to happen to Tobias, although he fought it. There was a way to stop my problems from being so important, and to replace my confused, broken feelings and instincts with another healthy set. A way to be useless to the war, to have no responsibility with no power, and that way sat, waiting, in my blood.

I would wear a wolf coat, and I would go and find the local pack and beg the leader to accept me. I would smell exactly like one of their members; would that make it easier or harder to become accepted? It didn’t matter, because I had no alternative. I might even do okay as a lone wolf, if I had to. I was smart. I could avoid traps and find food. Either way, the thoughts would fade with time if I didn’t fight to keep them, I was sure of it. The sharp points in my dull heart would be replaced with the simple and genuine emotion of an unspoiled wolf. More immediate concerns about survival would take precedence over moral quandaries. I wouldn’t need to worry about good and evil and gods and aliens because there would just be me and my pack and the prey and the weather.

I was doing the most selfish thing I could possibly do, I knew, running away in such a way. But the beauty of the plan was that that guilt, too, would fade with the rest, until there was nothing left to do but live my life.

I had to do it before Ax or Tobias noticed me and talked me out of it. I had a feeling that Tobias, especially, would be upset by this particular brand of cowardice. I couldn’t say goodbye to my parents; I’d never have the strength to do that. Whatever happened, I had to hold onto my resolve for two hours. I had to stay sure of this plan for two hours.

After that, it wouldn’t matter.

I stripped down to the morphing outfit I still wore from habit and stashed my clothes in the Spare Animorph Clothing Nook in the barn, and strode out into the rain. It struck like icy needles on my skin, oddly vicious for our first real downpour of the year, but I ignored it. I could already tell it wouldn’t last long. Neither would my vulnerable, hairless skin.

I was halfway to the forest when I heard Midnight come up behind me. She nudged my arm with her nose. Midnight knew that my wandering about in my morphing clothes at unreasonable hours meant I would probably go for a run with her. It was something I did on occasion, to cope. But I didn’t want to go on a run as a horse right then. I didn’t want to cope. I didn’t want to be fooled by feeling a bit better for an hour or so and stray from my mission.

“Sorry, girl,” I whispered, giving her an ear-scratch.

Midnight nickered and lipped my arm.

I sighed, something I seemed to be doing a lot. “I can’t go for a run with you,” I told her, “but you do need exercise. Twenty minutes. Okay?” I could spare twenty minutes.

Midnight followed me back to the barn where I got her tack and stood patiently while I got dressed again, brushed her down and saddled her. She’d always been a very quiet horse, and she didn’t make a fuss over the girth strap like some horses I’d had to deal with. Some horses made a game out of being as difficult as possible, but she just waited for me to be done. I ignored the insistent little voice in my mind that told me this was the last time I’d brush her, saddle her, ride her. I mounted, and steered her back toward the forest. Already the rain was dying down, leaving a world washed clean, almost sparkling in the bright moonlight. A fitting scene for a new life.

I clicked my tongue and guided her into a walk, then a trot. I probably shouldn’t have brought her as close to the forest as I did. Horse feet don’t do all that well in a forest, at least not when they’re carrying a rider, but I felt like I had to move towards the trees to stay on plan. Besides, if I hadn’t been so close to the trees, I wouldn’t have heard the scream.

It was a child’s scream, shrill and panicked. Without wasting time thinking about it, I kicked Midnight into a canter and headed into the forest, seeking the source. I could only hope that my horse didn’t take lame on the uneven ground as we tumbled headlong between the trees. Another scream; I corrected our direction and, soon after, saw our target; a young girl, perhaps seven or eight, sprawled out on the ground, her face a mask of terror and her frizzy hair full of mud and leaves. I wouldn’t have recognised the huge brown shape lumbering towards her so quickly if I hadn’t seen it a dozen times before through the chaos of battle. It was a bear. A grizzly bear.

I didn’t know why the grizzly bear didn’t like that girl. Maybe it had a cub somewhere. Maybe it was hungry. Maybe it was just feeling angry. But that girl was doomed if we didn’t do something.

 _So_ , I thought distantly as we bore down on the scene, _fate has one last rescue mission for Cassie the Animorph_.

As we passed, I leaned halfway out of my saddle and, gripping Midnight’s mane with one hand, scooped the girl up off the ground into the other. I’d seen a pair of trick riders do that once and they made it look graceful and easy. On a panicked horse, with a panicked partner, with no practice and in the middle of the forest, my grab was somewhat less graceful. I dragged her partly under Midnight for a few steps, hearing a worrying crunch as the horse accidentally trod on the girl’s foot and stumbled. With strength born of battle experience and sheer desperation, I dragged the girl across the front of the saddle and righted moments before we both would have been brained on a tree, and Midnight got her legs under herself again in time to skitter on some stones and dodge around a thorny bush. I was just realising we’d done it, we’d made it, and trying to figure out how to safely slow Midnight down, when she stopped very abruptly, throwing both me and the girl over her head and towards the river.

I’d forgotten about the river.

I’d forgotten that little, sudden showers down on our farm usually meant a lot more activity up in the mountains.

I’d forgotten that the river flowed from the mountains and had a tendency to flood quickly.

 _Ah, yes_ , I thought distantly as we pitched toward the seething waters, _this seems about right_.


	4. Chapter 4

Stay alive. Keep the girl clutched to my chest alive. That was the mission.

If I could find a way to get the girl out of the water safely, I could probably let the water take me. I mean, it’s not like I was going to be that much use to the world anymore anyway, right? Surely the life of a little girl was enough to buy an exit ticket, morally speaking. Not that I wanted to kill myself, exactly. I just, well, if I was going to die in the river, then I was going to die in the river.

Except I couldn’t do that either, because a little girl with an injured foot and clothing soaked through in the forest was as good as dead. If I wanted her to make it out, we both had to make it out.

There was little time for such thoughts. The river was like the world’s most dangerous rollercoaster, with the water throwing us this way and that and occasional stones and branches to dodge. And, of course, there was the added problem of not being able to breathe. I laboured to keep both of our heads above water while trying to shield the kid with my body. I wasn’t very successful. We snatched quick lungfuls of oxygen when the river deigned to push us that high, and took the beating of branches and sandbanks when it didn’t. After some time I was able to grab a small floating log, and we hung onto that for dear life as the forest shot past us. It made it slightly easier to get air, but not by much.

I’d come much closer to suffocation, of course, but not in my human body. Somehow it felt… well, more like me that way. My human body had been a safe zone, a form I could return to to erase the pains and dangers and evidence of battle. Having the river tear it apart felt… well, like sacrilege, I guess.

We were approaching a bend, and I saw my chance. There was a little area right at the elbow of the river where detritus was being thrown up by the water as it changed direction. Detritus like us. I made sure the girl had her arms wrapped securely around my torso, and let go. She clung tighter, squeezing the breath from me, and I reached out and dragged my hands through mud and twigs and stones, letting the water push us into the mess and then dragging us up before it snatched us away again. Handfuls of debris came away in my grip as I struggled, my shoulder muscles screaming as I slowly, slowly, pulled us up and away from the water. A short, agonising crawl later, and we were both panting on the bank. There was a sharp pain over my ribs and right side that flared every time I took a breath or moved. It felt like a couple of broken ribs. I’d be lucky if they were the worst of my injuries, given that I’d used my own body as a shield. Automatically, I went to morph them away.

The girl coughed.

Right. I had to be careful. I focused on Rachel instead of one of my inhuman morphs, and made sure to only morph my torso. It would be pretty hard to explain away why I had no bruises or cuts and I’d rather not have to try.

“Can you breathe?” I asked the girl as Rachel's ribs clicked into place under my skin.

“Yeah,” she said. Her voice was weak with fear and exertion.

Cold sinking into my bones, I finished demorphing and forced myself to stand up. I picked up the girl in both arms and carried her away from the river. Generally, this is a very bad thing to do to somebody with unknown injuries, especially if their spine or internal organs might be damaged. But it was a lot safer than sitting right next to a flooding river and hoping the water didn’t rise.

Besides, I was a lot more worried at how pale she was and how weakly she was shivering. Shock, at the very least. And I had no blankets, nothing dry, no heat source. I had nothing to treat her. Nothing but my ability to morph. Could I warm her as a wolf, and convince her later that she’d dreamed it? Maybe. She might be concussed. I considered checking, but there was nothing I could do about it if she was.

I put her down among the trees and glanced up. The sun would rise very soon. I hoped it was hot enough to save our lives.

“Take your outer clothing off,” I told the girl. She frowned at me, so I went to explain as I pulled off my own boots. “We’re soaked through and chilled. At this rate, we might freeze to death. We need to get dry, and that means we need to get rid of these wet things. We can dry them in the sun, when it rises.” It was a good thing that this had happened in the morning instead of the evening. If we had to wait ten or so hours for sunrise, things would be a whole lot trickier.

We shed our clothes until we both sat on the forest floor, shivering; me in my leotard, her in her underwear, clothes all bundled in a pile on her lap. I wasn’t wearing the full outfit with the gloves and everything. I’d only worn the leotard out of habit; I didn’t really need it, not if I was going to get myself trapped in morph. Now it was kind of awkward; I had no way to explain away why I was wearing a leotard under my work clothes. I really should take it off as well, as it trapped quite a bit of water, but it made me feel… well, like an Animorph. And I wasn’t really in danger of freezing. I could grow fur.

The girl didn’t ask about my leotard, though. She regarded me with solemn eyes, impressively calm for a child who’d been chased by a bear and thrown into a river, as I checked her for injuries.

Bumps. Bruises. No obvious signs of internal injury, although it was perfectly possible for internal injuries to leave no outward sign. There were a few deep gouges that might be a problem for infection, but only if the shock didn’t kill her first. The big problem was her left leg, where she’d been trodden on my Midnight. The ankle was definitely dislocated, and her shin seemed to be fractured.

“My name is Cassie,” I told her as I worked. “What is yours?”

“Karen,” she answered. She didn’t sound frightened or shaken. She sounded self-assured. Could that be a symptom of shock? I wasn’t used to working with humans.

“I need to splint this leg,” I explained to her. “I have to find some splints. Don’t go anywhere.” As if she could. I walked off into the trees until I was most definitely out of sight and began to morph hork-bajir, careful to keep my human face with its bumps and scrapes.

This was perfect. Just perfect. Apparently, I wasn’t allowed to disappear into the forest. Oh, no; the universe had to throw one last person at me first, one last innocent human to save. Well, fine. If saving another life was the price of my ticket out, then so be it. I’d get Karen home and then disappear, perhaps even with a slightly lighter conscience.

One last mission. I could do that.

I used my hork-bajir instincts to find a couple of promising sticks, cut them down, and demorphed, making sure to cut up my arms and legs a bit to mimic the damage of the river. It was exhausting to do too much morphing all at once but I figured I wouldn’t be doing very much for the next… however long it took people to find us.

 _And how long would that be?_ I wondered, as I returned to Karen. _A day? A week?_ I didn’t know how far we’d moved downriver. The Animorphs would track me to the river easily, but then they’d have to follow it, searching for me from the sky. How easy was it to find humans from the sky? Not hard, I reasoned, so long as we stayed close to the river. The canopy wasn’t too thick, and Tobias was a very experienced scout. If we were lucky, we might even be in the part of the forest that Tobias was intimately familiar with. He was pretty restless for a hawk, and spent somewhat less time in his own territory than was normal even when he wasn’t following Controllers.

I checked the fractured bone with my fingers to make sure it was straight enough to splint, laid the splints in place, and looked around for some kind of rope or something. My belt lay among my scattered clothes, all spread out to dry in the sun. That’d do. I picked it up and wrapped it around the splints, trying to keep the pressure even. It was barely long enough. The leather would probably give her welts, but they would heal much easier than an unsplinted bone would.

“Right,” I told my silent patient, “I’m going to have to tighten this, okay? It might hurt a bit, and I’m sorry, but if I don’t do this, your leg will probably heal wrong. I’m going to count to three, and then tighten. Alright?”

Karen was avoiding my gaze. She nodded.

I started counting.

“One…”

I yanked on the belt, pulling it tight around the fracture and dislocation. Karen yelped.

“You said on three!” she snapped, glaring at me. It was the first expression of emotion I’d seen from her since the river, and that made me feel a little better. She was still aware enough for that kind of emotion. That was a good sign.

“You would have tensed up on three,” I explained. “I needed you relaxed. It was for your own good.”

“It was a low-down andalite trick,” she snapped, still glaring. “You lot always think you hurt people _for their own good_.”

I had been an Animorph for about a year and a half. I wasn’t sure of exactly how long; I didn’t exactly count the days. Every one of them, every moment of living one wrong expression or comment away from discovery and death, contributed to me not freezing at that remark, and instead frowning in innocent puzzlement. “A what trick?”

“You might as well cut the act,” she snapped. “Did you really expect to fool me with that ploy? I know very well that you aren’t trapped out here. You can demorph and kill me with your tail any time you want, and then fly off home.”

“Look,” I said calmingly, “you might have hit you head in the river there. It’s possible you have concussion, where a blow to the head can – ”

“I don’t have con… whatever you said,” Karen snapped sulkily.

“You just said I have a tail,” I pointed out.

Karen snorted. “Fine. Keep up the act. I don’t care.” She hugged her knees, watching me through narrowed eyes. “Of course, I might be wrong,” she conceded. “Maybe you’re human after all.”

“Well I’m glad you think I’m human,” I said drily, trying not to relax visibly.

“Yeah. Visser Three seems pretty certain that humans can’t morph, but if you assume they _can_ , a whole lot of stuff starts to make sense.”

I sighed and got up. I spotted what I needed just a few trees away. A long, forked branch, too thick and too heavy to be used for a splint, hung from the tree. It looked dead. I applied my weight to it until it snapped, leaving me with a stick that reached a bit higher than my waist, one end a heavy fork and the other a jagged mess of splinters. One end a hammer, the other a spear.

I headed back towards Karen, stick gripped in both hands. I saw the apprehension and fear in her eyes, highlighted by the rising sun.

I gripped the stick tightly. A blow to stun, a quick thrust…

I handed it to her.

“This will make a good crutch,” I explained. “It’s better not to move, but if you have to, use this.”


	5. Chapter 5

Well, this was a fine mess I’d gotten myself into.

Out in the forest with a Controller. Who apparently knew who I was. Apparently, the price for my ticket to freedom wasn’t the life of a girl after all – it was her death. And I had to kill her, I knew that. This wasn’t some bystander, this was life and death. Even if I escaped into the mountains, she’d tell the other yeerks, and how long would it take them to find the Animorphs? It was self-defence, it was the only way to protect my friends, and keeping her alive just to spare my own feelings was… was selfish. Especially since the wolf wouldn’t care, after a while.

But I hadn’t been able to do it.

The sun rose, drying our clothes. Karen had refused to let me handle hers, so I’d watched the sky for scouting birds of prey while she laid them out herself. If one of the Animorphs arrived, the situation would be taken out of my hands. I wouldn’t have to do it. But that shouldn’t change anything, should it? Whether the killing blow was mine or theirs, she’d be dead. If I was willing to accept that, then I should be able to do it myself. It’s not like I hadn’t killed before. Maybe I should try morphing. Let the wolf do it. Let the hork-bajir do it.

I remembered throwing a hork-bajir on the ground, burying my wrist blade in his throat as he lay helpless, and felt sick.

When our clothes were dry enough to wear, we put them back on. Karen seemed to relax as she dressed; I felt more tense. The fabric imprisoning my body might be warmer than my leotard, but it was a prison, preventing me from morphing quickly or easily if I needed to. I told myself that was silly. I couldn’t morph in front of Karen, anyway.

But really, why not? Unless I had a way to convince her that she was wrong, her suspicion was almost as dangerous as certainty. Our big advantage had been that nobody seemed to think the ‘andalite bandits’ could be human. If they started thinking that way, well, we probably wouldn’t be all that hard to find. Even if they didn’t try, Tom would suspect Jake pretty quickly.

I watched Karen lace up the shoe she could actually wear, and reached a decision.

“We need to get moving,” I told her. “If you can’t walk, I can carry you.”

“Moving? Aren’t you supposed to stay in the same place when you’re lost?”

“Only if you don’t want to be swept away by the river again,” I lied. “Floodwaters rise fast, and we’re right in the path of danger. If we move further away, we’ll be safer.”

How well could the Animorphs track us from the sky? Probably not well. Tobias was a great scout but he’d never had to follow a trail through the forest, particularly a human one. Hopefully, we’d left no evidence they could follow on the riverbank. I stuck to moving under the trees as much as I could while I carried Karen away from the river, away from the one lead that rescue parties would have on us.

Away from the one hope my family would have. Would they be out searching when Midnight returned home panicked and riderless, or would they sit at home wringing their hands and waiting for a call? Would they see the trail leading to the water and fight off the obvious answer, that the chances of somebody coming out of that and living long enough to be found were slim indeed?

Would the Animorphs even bother looking for human trails, for a living human? Probably not, I realised. They’d expect me to morph and fly home. If I wasn’t home, there were two possible reasons for it – I was captured, or I was dead. And once they followed me to the river, they’d know I hadn’t been captured.

The only person in the world who had any reason to think I was alive was the girl in my arms. And the yeerk in her head, of course; the yeerk who wanted nothing more than to kill or enslave me.

But that was alright. Things were a whole lot simpler when I only had one enemy left in my life. And that enemy wasn’t the little girl. No; I was going to save her, no matter how things were stacked against me. I would save her and then I’d go back and be alive again, and I might even be able to do it before my friends and family lost all hope.

After all, I only needed three days.


	6. Chapter 6

I walked for hours, ignoring the thirst in my throat and the ache in my muscles. Karen fell asleep in my arms within half an hour, which was good because I didn’t think ‘we need to get away from the flooding river’ would’ve held up longer than that. The heat of her body pressed against mine reassured me that she’d live, at least unless infection or thirst got her. I really wished we’d had a canteen or something, some way to take the river water with us; I supposed I’d have to find another water source when we stopped. There wasn’t anything I could do about infection. But it was only for three days, until the thing in her head withered away and left her free. It might even die sooner, but naturally, I couldn’t take the chance that it was acting, so I’d have to keep her for three days just to be sure. I could keep her alive for three days, right?

I didn’t let myself think about what would happen after that. She couldn’t go home; she’d be recaptured. If she needed medical attention, we couldn’t drop her off at the yeerk hospital, or probably any hospital, since the first thing they’d do would be to find her parents. And somehow I didn’t think Rachel’s dad would take an eight-year-old ‘refugee’ who wanted her parents. What was he supposed to do with her? Lock her up somewhere? Free her from slavery only to imprison her? We couldn’t afford to let her be recaptured, not with such dangerous memories locked in her mind. I’d think of something. I had three days to think of something. It didn’t have to be now.

I’d found a likely-looking spot, a nice, flat rock where no trees could grow but that was hidden under the thick canopy of the surrounding forest. It was covered in moss and twigs, only the lack of roots betraying its presence. I put Karen gently down and sat back to rest. She opened her eyes and squinted up at the sun.

“How long were we moving?” she asked sleepily.

“Not long,” I lied. “You fell asleep so I put you down to rest. I didn’t want to leave you alone while you were sleeping.”

She eyed me. “Why didn’t you kill me when I was asleep?”

“I’m not going to kill you,” I said patiently. “I don’t know why you keep expecting me to. I just want to get out of this forest and back home, same as you.” I cocked my head. “Why do you think I want to kill you, anyway?” I’d thought long and hard about that question, during the walk. On the one hand, in case something went wrong, I wanted to play ‘clueless innocent’, not ‘person who was a clueless innocent until you told them of the invasion and who now needs to be infested’. But on the other, if I accidentally let something slip, I’d blow everything. It would be better if I let her tell me such things first, so I could still play innocent, and not put the Animorphs in any more danger than they already were.

Besides, it was important that I found out how she’d found me and why she thought I was an andalite bandit. If she’d figured it out, so could others.

In response to my question, Karen hugged her knees. “Because that’s what andalites do,” she grumbled. “They kill us.”

I frowned. “You used that word before. Andi…”

“An-da-lite. You know what it means.”

I put on my most patronising humouring-small-children smile. “Why don’t you remind me?”

She sighed impatiently. “Andalites are a people who use their technology to run around trying to intimidate and control everyone. If anyone tries to go against them, they get wiped out or locked up. Andalites decided Earth belonged to _them_ instead of _us_ , so they kill as many of us as they can find down here. We protect ourselves as best we can, but it’s never enough.” She rested her chin on her knees, not looking at me.

I swallowed the dozen or so questions on my tongue and instead said, “The Earth doesn’t belong to anyone. Is this some kind of cult thing?”

Karen rolled her eyes. “Sure. Why not. A cult thing. I don’t know why you’re doing this, Cassie, if that’s your real name.”

“It is my name.”

“Yeah, I think it might be. I watched you for a long time. I didn’t see you demorph.”

“What do you mean, you watched me for a long time?”

“Oh, right, this is the part where you pretend you didn’t notice me so that you can cover up your dumb ruse? I know you planned this.”

“I planned to get swept into a river?”

“Duh. But why?”

“I don’t know, kid, it’s your fantasy.”

Karen sighed and pulled up a bit of moss from the rock. She inspected it and flicked it away. “It was a dumb ruse anyway,” she muttered. “You’re not even the bear.”

I didn’t bother trying to untangle what that was supposed to mean. Instead I stood up and brushed the dirt from my jeans. “I’m going to find some branches to build a shelter,” I announced. “It might rain again and I’d like to be dry.” _And invisible from the air_. “I’ll stay in earshot, so call if you need anything.”

I’d watched Ax work on his scoop enough to know how to build a decent shelter, and as I searched for materials, I wished I had his tailblade. I didn’t dare morph hork-bajir again; the splints were covered by Karen’s jeans but I had the feeling that a lot of nicely trimmed branches used to make a shelter might make it obvious that something was off, especially if she was on the lookout for morphing. I carefully gathered an armload of branches, levering them from trees when I had to. I had a fairly large collection when it suddenly struck me what Karen had meant and I almost dropped them.

_You’re not even the bear._

Rachel. She’d thought that Rachel had attacked her out in the forest. She’d thought that… why would… It took me a moment to put it together. It wasn’t overly difficult; it was a pretty obvious plan if I’d wanted to convince somebody I wasn’t an andalite bandit. She’d thought we’d seen her following me, and decided to stage an ‘attack’ in the forest, from which I’d ‘rescue’ her. Maybe there should be more to it, if the river hadn’t intervened. But she seemed to think the river was part of the plan. Why? To make her dependent on me, so I could interrogate her? To add the threat of Kandrona starvation?

Well, that’s what I was doing, wasn’t it? Using Kandrona starvation? It was a pretty good theory, all things considered, except for the slight fact that it was wrong.

Wasn’t it?

What were the chances of that little girl raising the ire of a grizzly bear right when I was out riding? Or perhaps Rachel had seen her as a threat and planned to kill her, and I’d gotten in the way? No, not even Rachel would go straight to killing a little girl. She would’ve told the Animorphs.

Maybe she did. The Animorphs didn’t include me anymore, after all, did they? Maybe she thought it was none of my business.

I shook my head, as if that could clear it of disturbing thoughts. No, I was complicating things. My friends wouldn’t do something like that; they wouldn’t just try to kill her. They’d take her to the shack, starve out the yeerk, and then… think of _something_. Karen had been the person I’d sensed spying on me over the past couple of days, the Animorphs had nothing to do with it. We’d killed because we’d had to. But they wouldn’t kill somebody just for being inconvenient.

Unbidden, the image of thick hork-bajir blood staining my blades came to mind, the flash of irritation, the call to retreat that came either right _before_ the strike or _after_ …

Karen had fallen asleep again while I collected branches. That was dangerous. I shouldn’t have left her alone, or I should’ve put her up a tree or something. I didn’t turn my back on her while I started working on the shelter, even though she looked asleep and helpless. She’d been following me around and I’d assumed she was a friend and done nothing, and that was why we were in the middle of the forest. I wouldn’t repeat the mistake. I wouldn’t underestimate her.

I got to work erecting our shelter between a couple of trees on the edge of the rock. It’s not easy to build without rope, but I’d seen Ax do it many times, supporting the wood with his muscular tail while he twisted twigs together in little snags. My work wasn’t as good as his, but it would hold up for a few days.

Karen woke up just as I was finishing the frame. She jumped at the sound of a bird somewhere behind her.

“We should build a fire,” she said. “To scare off predators.”

“I don’t know how to build a fire from scratch,” I told her. “Do you?”

She hesitated, then shook her head.

“Besides,” I continued, “fire doesn’t scare predators. It’s a fact of life in the forest, and in most other land environments. Some of them even use it to hunt, if one happens to start.” I glanced at the sky. I didn’t add that woodsmoke would make it just that bit easier for rescuers to find us, especially rescuers coming by air.

Of course, without one, I had no way to feed Karen. I could hunt, certainly, but somehow I didn’t think she’d be willing to eat raw meat. And she was injured and thin… did fruits and nuts grow in the forest? Edible berries? I promised myself I’d read a survival manual as soon as I got home.

We needed a source of water. I could fly to the river as a bird, but I didn’t want to morph all the way with Karen around because I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to recreate my head wounds properly afterwards, and if she saw me healed, she’d know she was right. Besides, I didn’t have anything to carry water in.

I sat with my back against a tree and stared up at the branches above. Across the rock from me, Karen shifted nervously. I glanced at her and she hugged her knees and glared back at me sullenly.

“We’ll get out of this,” I assured her, talking more to the girl than the yeerk. “Somebody will find us.”

“Unless you just get on with killing me first,” she remarked. “Or are you hoping your friends will come and to the dirty work for you?”

“This again?” I rolled my eyes. “Why do you keep saying I’m going to kill you.”

“Because I was there, Cassie, if that’s even your name. I saw you kill my brother.”

A chill went up my spine. “Your what?”

“My brother. Forty-seven. We were setting up for a Sharing event out in the forest and he was on guard duty. Not even guarding anything important, just being there in case we needed backup. And then we’re having dinner when suddenly the ground opens up right under us and a whole bunch of blood-soaked animals come pouring out of a Pool entrance that was _supposed_ to be sealed.”

I swallowed and looked away, trying to force my face into a convincing ‘this is silly’ expression. In my memory, the cry of ‘rush the exit!’ given by freed hosts echoed back and forth and we fled, pushing through the crush of bodies, up and out into the light…

“These animals all come rushing out,” she continued, “and I just freeze, I don’t move out of the way fast enough, and suddenly there’s this hork-bajir standing over me – not a real hork-bajir, mind, an andalite – and I’m thinking ‘oh, well, I’m going to die’. And my brother leaps forward to protect me. And do you know what the andalite does?”

“No,” I said, trying not to let my voice sound hollow.

“It grabs my brother’s neck, just snatches him from the air, and throws him down. And then it cuts open his throat, right there, getting his blood all over me.”

I didn’t look at her. I remembered, now, that startled little face, moments before the hork-bajir shouted and leapt… _to get my attention_ , I realised; _he’d shouted on purpose to get my attention_ …

“So I followed you,” she continued briskly. “There was chaos, everybody was trying to regroup, nobody was looking for me. I couldn’t keep up, but there were tracks, blood. I went to the river where there were clear footprints in the bank and do you know what I saw, Cassie? Apart from all the blood?”

I shook my head.

“I saw hork-bajir footprints and wolf footprints, where you’d changed shape to go home. And I also saw human footprints. I measured them and checked out the nearby farms and found you and you alone. I figured maybe an andalite was trying to blend in, but I’ve been thinking, and if you really were an andalite, why would you morph human there on the bank only to turn straight into a wolf? Sure is a puzzle, huh?”

“You’re aware that only about half of what you say makes sense, right?” I asked distantly, trying to keep any tremor out of my voice. I stood up.

“Where are you going?” Karen asked, panic in her voice.

“Not out of earshot. I need to finish the shelter. Call if you need help.” I needed grass and leaves and twigs to fill gaps in the roof. More than that, I needed to hide my face. I needed to be somewhere that Karen couldn’t see me. I strode off between the trees, tears already dripping down my cheeks.

Her brother, huh? Or not hers, the… the yeerk’s brother. Did yeerks have siblings? I supposed that they must. I’d never really thought about it before. They were slavers who were trying to conquer our planet, why would I care if they were related?

Why would I care if a little girl watched me kill her brother in front of her eyes?

 _Not a little girl_ , I told myself, _a yeerk, a yeerk_. A yeerk who was using that girl’s face and voice like a weapon against me, as surely as I used my wolf morph’s teeth or my hork-bajir morph’s blades. The difference was that the wolf I’d taken my morph from lived free in the forest, and Jara Hamee who’d supplied my hork-bajir DNA was secure in the mountains with his family. I didn’t crawl inside somebody’s brain and control them, strip away their privacy, their autonomy, their very selves.

I was breathing hard, I realised. I felt dizzy, like my mind was filling with cotton wool. Fury, maybe? Disgust? At the yeerks? At myself?

The task at hand, concentrate on the task at hand. Leaves, grass, twigs. I started to collect what I needed. I headed back for camp, and froze halfway there, a sense of nagging unease overtaking me. Something was off. What? I listened hard, but heard only the small sounds of animals going out their day. I took cautious step forward, then another. Once I was able to see Karen, I relaxed.

Woodsmoke. That’s what was wrong; I’d smelled woodsmoke. I hadn’t been expecting a fire, but somehow she’d gotten one started, scraping moss and twigs from the stone to make a safe place to light one. She had her back to me as she fed it twigs.

“I thought you didn’t know how to start a fire,” I said, and she jumped.

“I just did what they to in the movies,” she muttered. “It was easier than I thought.” She was avoiding my eyes, staring instead into the flames. I couldn’t blame her. I wouldn’t want to look at me either.

I went back to work on the shelter. I couldn’t help but gaze at the sky nervously every now and then. The fire was small and dry and covered by the trees; it didn’t produce much smoke and I didn’t think it could be seen very well from the sky, but Tobias did have very good eyesight. Still, I couldn’t very well tell her to put it out. I didn’t have a good excuse for not having a fire.

She went to find wood occasionally, and I didn’t stop her. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea for her to walk around on her injured leg or not, but the doctor could sort that out after I’d cured her from her infestation. There was no fear of losing track of her; between her foot, her crutch, and her clear lack of experience with forests, she lumbered about like an elephant. I went to collect more grass and twigs for the shelter occasionally as well, and was careful to keep her within earshot. I would’ve preferred to build in a tree, up off the ground and away from most predators, but there was no way Karen could get in and out of a tree easily. Besides, I didn’t know how to build a tree shelter.

I was _definitely_ going to learn about bush survival once Karen was free.

Our shelter was pretty much finished when Karen looked over her collected of firewood, nodded to herself, and sat down.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “And thirsty.”

I nodded. “I’ll find us something.”

“You’ll _kill_ us something, you mean,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

I blinked at her. “Well, there sure aren’t any gourmet vegetarian restaurants out here.”

“Humans are disgusting,” she muttered.

I very nearly broke my cover to ask her just how she got the nerve to question us eating meat when her kind went around enslaving every part of the galaxy they could get their hands on, but I bit my tongue and trudged off into the trees. If she wasn’t willing to eat what I hunted, well, she could just go hungry.

I was well into the trees before I remembered that I couldn’t morph all the way without healing my injuries.

Dammit. How was I supposed to hunt?

I wasn’t used to being so… mortal. So at the whims of my environment and my injuries. For the longest time it had seemed like just about anything was possible, so long as I had enough determination and nerve to make it happen. I’d fallen from low earth orbit, I’d been cut to pieces and disembowelled, I’d navigated impenetrable secret rooms and walked into the heart of the enemy’s base and hid everything I did below a head shake and an innocent smile. Heights and injuries and food and water meant nothing to me; if I was desperate, truly desperate, and left somewhere with no food whatsoever, I could use my horse morph to produce as much meat as I’d wanted (although I’d definitely have nightmares over something like that for the rest of my life). I’d fallen out of the habit of thinking that the mundane world really applied to me anymore.

And here… here, I wasn’t even that restricted. I had to keep my own head and look after a girl who didn’t have the same powers as me for a few days; fine. No big deal. But I was already falling apart. How did people do this? How did ordinary humans survive in a forest? I looked at my own hands, raw and bloody where I’d worked them without a care for them. One of my thumbs was sliced neatly open from some sharp branch or other. I hadn’t even noticed.

I healed it, and then began to trace my own face with my fingertips. Maybe I could feel the scratches, reproduce them after I morphed, and she wouldn’t notice…

There was a high, piercing scream behind me.

I turned and bolted back toward the camp. It was empty, the fire smouldering. Where? What happened?

The scream, a second time, off in the trees. I bolted after it, not even considering the possibility of needing to be careful. I found Karen crumpled against a tree, not looking at me. Her crutch was lying against an entirely different tree. There was blood on it.

She had a Dracon beam clutched in her tiny hands, aimed unsteadily between the trees. I froze. What had she seen? Was she hurt? Was it her blood?

Something moved, very close to her. I hadn’t seen it approach; I just saw it leap. Without thinking, I ran and threw myself at the beast as it opened its killing jaws.

 _Oh, right_ , I thought as I ran. _A leopard escaped from some moron’s private zoo. I should have known, with my luck, that this exact thing would happen_.

Leopards are very, very big cats. This one was underfed, ribs poking out under its dull, patchy fur, but it was still heavier than me. I didn’t manage to knock it away as I collided and grabbed at its throat with my teeth, but I did distract it. It pulled backwards; Karen aimed her Dracon beam and fired. The shot went wild, leaving a dark burn against the trees behind us, but I wasn’t paying attention; I was too busy trying not to die. The leopard was on top of me; it grabbed my left arm in its jaws and bit down until teeth scraped bone. I could taste its blood and realised that I was attacking with human teeth, little human teeth in my tiny, weak human jaw. I’d taken a bite out of the leopard’s throat, but I certainly wasn’t going to do any lasting damage that way.

If it got my throat, on the other hand, I was dead. A leopard’s preferred method of killing their prey is to crush its throat with their jaws, and a leopard could take down things much larger than me. Karen was aiming her Dracon beam again. She could very well kill both of us and start a forest fire with that thing.

“I got this!” I lied, spitting out leopard flesh. “Leave it to me!”

I felt one of the bones in my arm crack. I was glad. If the leopard didn’t have a mouthful of my arm, it would have had a chance to go through my throat.

Smaller, weaker, no natural weapons, no artificial weapons. What now?

Instinctively, I used the only tool still available to me.

I pulled at the leopard through my injured arm, let its essence flow into me. It went calm, as animals usually do when they’re being acquired. Unfortunately, they never seemed to stay calm for the same amount of time, and I could only acquire it once.

I had at least a few seconds, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Karen’s crutch.

I reached out with my right arm, stretched, dragged it over with my fingertips. I dragged my left arm out of the leopard’s mouth, feeling my flesh strip away between its teeth. My fingers didn’t work right on that hand, but they worked just well enough to curl around the crutch. As the leopard woke from its daze, I slammed the crutch into the side of its face.

It backed away a few steps, and I could sit up.

Both sides of its face were bloodied, I noticed; one from my whack, the other presumably from Karen’s. It could outrun me. It could outfight me. I drew my thoughts together and focused.

Fur grew along my body, bright and shiny and pale with dark rosettes blooming within it. Where it moved over cut skin, it left fresh skin behind. My bones shifted, my muscles grew. My shirt split to accommodate the thick chest of a leopard.

But this was no half-starved, blooded beast. No, the bones poking from the leopard’s ribs and the dull patchiness of its coat were as much a sign of damage as any cut; they weren’t in the form this leopard’s DNA ‘should’ build. I felt a healthy layer of fat crawl over my new strong muscles as I got on all fours, pulling the shreds of my clothes away as I did so.

The leopard backed away, its tail twitching. It had attacked out of hunger and desperation. It was not prepared to fight a stronger, healthier version of itself.

Karen raised her Dracon beam again, hands trembling.

<Let it go,> I said openly, letting my exultation at the strength of this form and thrill of the battle ring through my words. <It’s not its fault. It’s starving and desperate.>

Leopards are territorial, but prefer to avoid each other rather than fight. The leopard left.

I looked at Karen. She swung her Dracon beam to aim at me.

I disappeared.

Leopards are masters of camouflage. They’re not forest animals, and Jake’s tiger would probably be technically better at blending in in a forest than I was, but for human eyesight the difference doesn’t matter. I moved into the trees and, from Karen’s perspective, I had vanished. A leopard is seen only when it wants to be seen.

I crept around behind her, dizzy with the fight. I’d taken on a _leopard_! I’d taken on a leopard and _not died_! Some people think that lions are the kings of big cats but that’s just because they know nothing about leopards. Leopards are the true masters of the cat kingdom. Admittedly I’d used alien technology to stay alive, but still.

And now the girl was helpless against me. One quick bite to the throat, and my problems were over. I could disappear into the mountains as I’d wanted. Just one quick bite. It shouldn’t even be hard; I had the leopard’s instincts now, I could let the leopard do it.

I slipped up a tree, easy as anything. Leopards didn’t usually attack from trees, but I could, if I wanted to.

Karen was looking wildly around, trying to spot me among the tree trunks. I leapt down lightly, took the Dracon beam in my teeth, and disappeared again. She pressed herself against the tree trunk, face pale.

I did a circuit to make sure that the real leopard was gone before I demorphed and returned to get dressed. My clothes were torn and soaked in blood, but wearable.

“Are you hurt?” I asked Karen as I flicked the Dracon’s power to Safety and went to stuff it in my jeans.

“That’s mine!” she snapped. “Give it back!”

“This?” I inspected the Dracon beam. “This grip is for a hork-bajir hand. No wonder you missed. Why would a little girl have this?”

She looked away.

“You used this to light the fire, didn’t you? And… oh, this is why you kept goading me to morph and kill you. You wanted to kill me when I was half-morphed and helpless, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t going to kill you,” she snapped.

“Infest me, then.”

Karen glared at me sullenly.

I sighed and picked up her crutch. She flinched when I held it out to her.

“Come on,” I said gently. “Let’s get back to camp.”


	7. Chapter 7

We worked the fire back up in silence as the sun began to set off through the trees. One day down, two to go.

And there was no use pretending any more.

“So,” I said, “what’s your real name?”

“Aftran,” she said. Her voice cracked a little with lack of water, but she hadn’t complained about hunger or thirst again. “Aftran nine four two, of the Katt Dialma pool.”

“I’d say I’m pleased to meet you,” I said, “but, well, you know.”

She nodded. “Seems like a bit of a waste of time now, huh?”

“What does?”

“Saving me. But I guess you got a new morph out of it.”

I cocked my head. I didn’t know how much the yeerks as a whole knew about morphing. Did Visser Three try to keep any of it a secret? Did they know about the time limits? Did they have information I didn’t, information that could be useful?

Well, if they did, I certainly wouldn’t be able to get it out of Aftran. “I don’t want to kill you, you know,” I told her.

She snorted.

“If I did,” I pointed out, “you’d be dead already.”

“Why aren’t I?” she asked. “You killed my brother with no trouble at all. Boom, one cut. I bet if I had a hork-bajir or a taxxon host you wouldn’t even have pulled me out of the river. You wouldn’t have even bothered pulling me into the river. You probably would’ve helped the bear.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “We didn’t ask you to come here,” I snapped. “If you guys weren’t trying to enslave us and take over our planet then nobody would be dying, not even hork-bajir and taxxons. If you'd just stay on your own planet then none of this would be happening.” That strange dizzying pressure was back in my head. I wondered if I was imagining it. I hoped it would go away.

“What planet?” she snapped. “I was born in space. We were dodging andalite assaults left and right to settle safely, and you’re telling me that, what? We should’ve turned around and headed back to the mud pits of our ancestors, waiting for andalites to burn us to a crisp any time we pulled our heads from the muck, to escape your teeny little blades?”

“I’m saying,” I said, trying to stay calm, “that you started this. Not us. We’re just protecting ourselves out there.”

“And we’re not?”

“Enslaving people is not an act of self defense!” I snapped, getting to my feet. The sun was down, and Karen’s features were sharp in the firelight.

“I’m going to patrol around the camp,” I told her. “I’ll be within earshot.” And with that, I stalked off into the trees.

I used my wolf morph, since I was most familiar with its nose, to check for predators. There was nothing except my own wolf scent. The leopard hadn’t come this close to camp, and it was probably far away by then.

Karen was asleep when I returned. I moved her inside the shelter and put my jacket over her, then banked the fire. A couple of minutes later I was on owl wings, heading for the river.

I hated leaving her alone, but without water, she was going to die. There was no choice but to take the chance that she would be okay. What had felt like a really long walk to a wounded human girl carrying somebody else was nothing at all to an owl, and I was demorphing before I’d really recovered from the morph.

Next, I morphed hork-bajir, and looked for some old wood.

I’d need to ask Ket and Jara to teach me how to be a hork-bajir, assuming they didn’t mind. It seemed absurd to me that I could cut an enemy to pieces on my blades and yet had no idea how to use them properly. Through trial and error, I managed to hollow out some bits of wood to make crude buckets, and then hack some other bits of wood into lids. I waterproofed them by turning into a Leeran and using the slime on my body. I would just have to hope it wasn’t toxic to humans, or at least, not too toxic.

It occurred to me that stuff that I would’ve called pretty gross a couple of years ago was now just common sense to me. I decided not to tell Karen about the slime part.

I filled and plugged four buckets, then secured them to my body with long strips of strong green bark that my hork-bajir senses and instincts assured me would not break. I had plenty of blades to act as holds, and quickly found a strap arrangement that let me move easily without losing any buckets. Then I demorphed and remorphed just to be careful with the time limit, pulled myself into the trees, and headed back to camp.

I didn’t want to sleep in the shelter with her. I’d hidden the Dracon beam, but if she woke up and I was asleep, she could crawl over and push Karen’s ear to mine and… I shuddered.

I climbed into the tree above the shelter, tying myself in place with the makeshift straps I’d used to carry the water. It was cold, but I didn’t retrieve my jacket; Karen needed the warmth more than I did. I could always grow a fur coat if I had to, so long as I was careful not to fall asleep in morph.

I woke with the sun, chilled to the bone and with straps of bark biting into my flesh. Karen was already crawling out of the shelter. I freed myself with clumsy, cramped arms and dropped to the ground, landing badly.

“There’s water in those buckets if you’re thirsty,” I told her.

She glanced at me, then at the tree. “What were you doing up there?” she asked, levering the lid from a bucket and scooping several handfuls of water into her mouth. I considered stopping her until we boiled it, but running river water was probably fine, or at least wouldn’t kill her within a couple of days. Of course, with Karen now knowing what I could do, the question of what to do with her afterwards was more pressing…

Right, I’d been asked a question. “I was keeping lookout,” I lied.

“All night?”

“No,” I admitted. “I fell asleep.”

Karen snorted and drank some more water. I stretched, trying to get some life into my limbs.

“I should go find us some food,” I said. “You must be hungry. We haven’t eaten in a whole day.”

“What if the jaguar comes back?”

“It was a leopard. And it won’t.”

“But what if it does? What if there are a whole pride of them?”

I sighed and sat down. “There aren’t,” I said. “Leopards live alone, and the one we met last night should think this is my morph’s territory and go somewhere else. There aren’t meant to be leopards in this forest. That one escaped a private zoo, he was hungry and desperate.” _Which is why we’re alive_ , I added silently.

“Okay,” she said, “but what if it doesn’t go somewhere else?”

“If I don’t hunt, you’ll starve.”

“Humans can go without food for like a week.”

“Tiny, wounded ones can’t.”

“Why do you care?” she snapped, sitting heavily down by the ashes of the long-dead fire. “You only need me out here for two more days.”

There was a long, awkward silence.

“Oh,” I said eventually. “You know about that.”

“It wasn’t hard to figure out.” She stared at the ash. “Have you ever seen a yeerk starve?”

“Yes.”

“What was it like?”

“… It’s probably better not to talk about it.”

She glared at me. There was moisture in her eyes. In actual fact Jake had been sedated when his yeerk had starved and I hadn’t seen anything, but he’d told me afterwards that he remembered the pain. He’d felt only the _idea_ of pain, the concept of the sensation through their mental connection, but it was enough to know that the yeerk was going through near-unbearable agony. It was hard to know just what Jake remembered and what he had imagined, but the fear in Karen’s eyes told me that he was probably right.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I told Aftran. “I just want to save Karen and… and protect my friends. You know too much.”

“So does Karen.”

“But you’ll tell the Empire. Will Karen?”

She looked away.

“I can make it quick,” I offered. “If you’ll come out.”

Aftran scoffed. “And make it easy for you?”

“And easier for you.”

“Who cares what’s easy for me? I’m already dead.” She said it with a lot of conviction, for somebody who was worried about predators mere minutes ago.

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? You weren’t sorry over my brother.”

I looked down at my arms. It was too easy to imagine the blood-coated blades on them. “I was,” I said quietly. “But it was too late.”

“So, what, you think telling me you’re sorry in advance will make you feel better?”

“I don’t want to – ”

“We both know that’s a lie.” Karen’s features were twisted into an expression of hate and revulsion. “If you didn’t want to kill us, you wouldn’t kill us. But you’re happy when we die, aren’t you? You’re just like the andalites, you’d prefer it if we were all dead. We’re just slugs to you, aren’t we? Something that comes out after it rains and you step on it and go ‘eeew!’”

I opened my mouth to respond, to tell her that she had come here to enslave us, that she was a threat to my family and friends, that we were just defending ourselves. I met her eyes, and my voice died in my throat. I saw the person behind those eyes – not Karen, probably frightened and begging for help unheard, but Aftran. I swallowed.

I felt sick.

“I have to hunt,” I said quickly, and marched off into the trees before my thoughts could show on my face. I had to think. I had to sort things out. And I couldn’t do it there.

I just hoped that I could hold myself together long enough to see the mission through.


	8. Chapter 8

Here’s the thing about rationalism.

Most major human philosophies – not all, but most – are either clear, or natural. Some are both. Things like religion and patriotism are very natural to humans; the sort of thinking they require, the sort of instincts they’re based on, are an inherent part of us. Since humans could first imagine what they couldn’t see, the world has been a place of spirits and gods and their stories and commandments. Since long before then, the world has been a place of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of family and not-family, normal and foreign, justified action and enemy incursion.

Other philosophies aren’t as natural to a normal human mindset, and it took a lot of cultural evolution to come up with them. Pacifism and vegetarianism, for example, are things that occur to cultures who have the luxury of thinking about it. They take a while. But they’re not difficult in theory, because they’re very clear. Pacifists and vegetarians might disagree on what counts as violence and what counts as meat, but each person knows their own ‘rules’. A pacifist who punches somebody in the face knows whether they have done wrong or not.

Rationalism is one of those philosophies which is neither natural nor clear. Human brains don’t think rationally. They just don’t. For most of human history, being right about how the world worked wasn’t all that important. Not being wrong enough to die was important. Being cautious was important. Feeling certain and being able to convince others was important. Being right? Usually too risky, if it comes at the expense of the other things. Rationalism is something that took thousands of years to come up with, and constant effort. It’s not something you can learn and be done with. It’s fundamentally opposed to how humans think.

The ‘rules’ of rationalism are pretty clear, but whether they’re being used properly isn’t. Trying to find bias in one’s own thinking is nearly impossible. The brain loves to put together things that its owner wants to be true and then present a nice, clear, logical-sounding line of reasoning, so you think you thought it all out nice and properly. Very often, this is not true. The brain also likes to distract with irrelevant stuff, making it seem hugely relevant; anything to protect itself from having to change its view. The rationalist who relaxes and stops checking for biases and logical fallacies has stopped behaving like a rationalist. The rationalist who assumes that their conclusions are rational has stopped acting like a rationalist. There is always more to learn, and there are always big flaws in knowledge and reasoning, and I knew that.

If I was being a good little rationalist, I really shouldn’t have been surprised. I shouldn’t have felt dizzy and sick and shocked when the realisation hit me all at once, my own stupidity laid out before me like a sudden, glaring neon sign pointing to my own cognitive dissonance, and flashing. The truth that every single Animorph had figured out before me.

Earth was being invaded by aliens.

Aliens. Not just some vague force that brought along a bunch of innocent aliens like hork-bajir with them. I almost laughed out loud. For ages, I’d been sitting about asking myself pointless questions about whether I even believed in right and wrong, whether sentience was important, whether people mattered.

What stupid questions. Of course people mattered. I’d been dithering, assuming the cognitive dissonance I’d sensed was about the value of people and of our work. Not once had I considered that I might be wrestling over my denial of the incredibly obvious fact that yeerks were people.

That my kill count was twice as high as I’d thought. That each snap of my teeth and stroke of my blade took two lives. Oh, sure, I’d recited the same lines as everyone else – that this was self-defense, that the yeerks were killing and enslaving us, that they started it and we’d had no choice. But that had been lip service. I hadn’t really cared, had I? I’d just thrown about words occasionally to justify my lack of caring. And it’s okay not to care about things that you really should, but with so many lives in my hands I had a responsibility to be doubly attentive to my actions if I didn’t care about them.

Aftran was right. We’d called them slugs. We’d hated them, not just for their actions but for what they were, helpless little gooey bags covered in gross slime. Even thinking about them turned my stomach. But my personal disgust didn’t determine whether somebody was a person or not. I’d been thinking ‘oh, just because humans don’t like termites doesn’t mean we should disregard them’ – termites, I’d been worried about. While committing the same crime against a sentient species.

No, my crime was worse. I paused in the middle of undressing, trying to remember what it was I kept calling the yeerks. Not slugs, like the others. What was it I said? Interstellar smallpox. That was it.

Smallpox was once a very deadly virus, a stray collection of DNA that snatched young lives by the hundreds until vaccines were invented. With a lot of effort, it was completely wiped out. It was the first and only time humans have wiped out a deadly virus.

Humans send a lot of plants and animals to extinction; viruses are a lot harder, unless you want to kill all their hosts. But we’d done it, once. The death of a species of animal or plant, the sudden pruning of our evolutionary tree, is a tragedy, but viruses aren’t even truly alive, and nobody sees any inherent value in them; their worth is only in what they do to others. To wipe out this particular arrangement of DNA was a huge achievement, worthy of honor and celebration.

Of course, we have a different word for when you try to do that to a people.

Genocide.

My hands were shaking too much to get my pants off. I leaned back against a tree and took several deep, calming breaths, trying not to sob.

One could argue that what we were doing was self-defence. One could argue that we had a right to defend our own species, that the yeerks were putting themselves in danger, that it wasn’t my responsibility to worry about the safety and comfort of my oppressors. One could argue that if the yeerks wanted to be treated with mercy and consideration, they should stop sacrificing their slaves in battle while heading out to enslave more. One could make all those arguments. Maybe those arguments were justified. That wasn’t the point.

The point was that I hadn’t seriously proposed any of those arguments. I'd said them, sure enough, pulling out the right phrase for the right concern whenever I needed to; I’d used them as lip service to avoid thinking... but I hadn’t reasoned through them, reasoned through a yeerk’s right to live. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was important.

“My name is Cassie,” I told the forest, “and I am a killer. My name is Cassie, and dozens of enemies and innocents have fallen under my teeth and blades. I have stood guard over a small Yeerk Pool while my leader boiled the people in it alive. I have put drugs in a larger Yeerk Pool to condemn hundreds, maybe thousands, more to death. I executed Aftran’s brother while he lay helpless before me.” I let the guilt, the burning, cleansing guilt, run through me, center me, purify me. Of course, it couldn’t actually purify me – merely feeling guilty over a sin doesn’t stop that sin from having happened – but I let myself pretend all the same. Guilt I was familiar with. Guilt I could handle. It was simpler, less scary, less confusing than major cognitive dissonance. We may have ‘loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night’, as Sarah Williams put it, but it was normal to wish instead for bright moonlight to take the edge off the night’s shadows, and deal with the few stars bright enough to still be visible before diving right in.

Slightly calmer, I finished undressing and let my thoughts fill with the form, the senses, the mind of a wolf. Then I lifted my nose to the air and sniffed. Hunting took a lot of concentration, especially for a lone wolf; it was a mixture of focus, skill and luck, and if I let myself be preoccupied then we’d go another day without food. I had to focus on the task at hand.

That was okay. I didn’t want to think any more anyway.


	9. Chapter 9

Luck was on my side and I was able to catch a small rabbit. I morphed hork-bajir to make use of Jara Hamee’s blades and skin the thing. Hork-bajir blades turned out to be pretty good at skinning rabbits, although I wasn’t. It was a good thing I had no use for the rabbit skin because it was a mess by the time I was finished. I gutted my kill, buried the offal a fair distance away, and then took the meat in one huge hork-bajir hand and strode back into the camp.

The instant Karen saw me, she went white. She froze, eyes wide, pressing her back against a tree. The scene was really familiar; was I remembering the bear attack? No, not that; I was remembering that face staring at me in fear a moment before a hork-bajir-Controller had leapt at me from behind to distract me. Before I’d thrown him to the ground. Before, either moments before or moments after I’d been given the command to retreat, I’d laid his throat open and soaked the yeerk’s sister in his host’s blood.

<It’s okay,> I said quickly. <It’s me.>

I don’t know why I’d expected that to help. I was the one she was afraid of. Why would reminding her of that make her feel better? Instead, I demorphed and put the rabbit over the fire.

“Sorry,” I said again. “I didn’t think.”

Aftran shrugged. She’d gotten Karen’s features into a calmer expression while I’d demorphed and I didn’t know whether she was still scared or not. Yeerks are pretty good actors, on the whole. It’s a survival trait.

I supposed she must have had it mostly together when she wrinkled her nose at the smell of cooking meat and said, “Couldn’t you have gathered some wild berries or mushrooms or something?”

“Do you know what mushrooms in the forest are okay to eat and what ones are poisonous?”

“No.”

“Me neither. It’s not something we want to gamble on out here. I don’t know what mushrooms will kill a human, but I do know that cooked rabbit won’t.” I turned the meat over in the fire.

“Aren’t you supposed to be all naturish and stuff?”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Naturish?”

“Yeah, like how you are with that barn full of animals.”

“I can nurse hurt animals,” I confirmed. “I don’t know anything about plants. Why would I? We buy our feed for the Clinic patients. I could probably tell you a little bit about what most of our patients eat, but not details. I couldn’t tell you what is and isn’t poisonous.”

Aftran nodded and stared into the flames. I wondered if she, her yeerk self, was feeling hungry yet.

“What’s the Yeerk Pool like?” I asked.

She blinked hard at me. “What?”

“The Pool. I mean from outside it just looks like a pool of goo. What’s it like?” I’d technically been in the Pool, but I didn’t think that fighting for my life in the body of an old woman while hork-bajir kept trying to push me under the surface counted as a useful Yeerk Pool experience.

Aftran seemed surprised by the question, but she took the time to contemplate it all the same.

“It’s a pool,” she said eventually. “Full of yeerks.”

“Thank you,” I said, “for that marvellous insight.”

Aftran shrugged. “What else is there to say about it? It’s dark, because yeerks can’t see. It’s mostly silent, except for when somebody needs to navigate to the pier; we don’t talk much outside our hosts. Humans are _really_ chatty.” She screwed up her nose again. “We eat, we stop feeling hungry, we return to the world. What else is there to know?”

I shrugged. I guess I’d expected something more exciting. Maybe eating was to yeerks like sleeping was to humans. There was no reason to assume that yeerks were interested in the same sort of activities that we were. “So yeerks who don’t have hosts are just… in some kind of… stasis, until they get one?”

“Not stasis. They’re awake. They’re just bored. Pools – proper Pools, I mean, not the hole in the ground under this city – have electronic interfaces so that we can be trained in language and strategy and stuff without having to take up a lot of host bodies, but there aren’t really enough to go around.”

Not enough to go around? Why not? The yeerks had huge spaceships covered in laser weapons. How expensive could it be to put enough electronic interface things in their Pools?

“Why aren’t there any in the Pool under the city?” I asked.

Aftran shot me an expression that said very clearly that I was an idiot. “It keeps getting attacked,” she pointed out. “Besides which, it’s still under construction, and the yeerks in it mostly have hosts or they wouldn’t be there. There are no young ones or host-free yeerks to train, why would we need the interfaces?”

That made sense, I supposed. To me, the Pool under the city had always been _the_ Yeerk Pool; I hadn’t really thought about how it was basically a military camp. About how there would have to be Pools somewhere that weren’t military camps. About how they might be different.

The rabbit was done. I pulled it from the fire, not caring that it burned my fingers, and gave it to Aftran. She watched me through Karen’s intense, green eyes.

“You’re not having any?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I ate on the hunt,” I lied. I wasn’t sure how successful I’d be the next time I hunted, and I wanted to be sure that Karen had enough food. There was no reason for her and Aftran to both be hungry.

Besides, my experience with the leopard had left me wondering whether I, as an Animorph, even needed food. I remembered a proper layer of fat blooming under my skin as I faced down the scraggly, half-starved cat that had tried for my injured companion. I knew that my own body weight had changed since becoming an Animorph, so clearly morphing didn’t just ‘reset’ me at some arbitrary healthy weight; I knew that sometimes I demorphed hungry and sometimes I didn’t, so it didn’t ‘reset’ me at some arbitrary blood sugar level either. But I was pretty sure it wouldn’t let me demorph to a starving human form. If starvation was in injury in the leopard then it was an injury in me. Right?

I supposed I wouldn’t find out. I was hardly going to starve over three days. Karen, on the other hand, was smaller and thinner than me, and had injuries to heal. She might need strength to fight off an infection. Keeping her fed was of the utmost importance.

When Karen was full, I took the remainder of the rabbit away from the camp to avoid attracting scavengers. I stripped away the meat she’d left as I walked, eating too quickly to be cautious of the small, sharp bones. I could reason about not needing food as much as I liked, but I _was_ hungry. Once I’d sucked every fragment of meat off, I cracked the bone open with my teeth, but there was little marrow to speak of. I buried the skeleton and returned to camp, collecting the clothes I’d shed for the hunt on the way.

Karen – Aftran – watched me sullenly on my return. I was going to have to do something about her. As her three-day deadline approached, she was going to get more and more desperate to escape. She had no real choice but to try to kill me and run off into the forest.

She wouldn’t get far, of course. Even if she knew which way to go, she’d never get back to civilisation in time. But she could get Karen killed trying.

“So you’re not wearing the shape you used to kill Forty-seven this time,” she grumbled in the tone of somebody running out of things to grumble about.

Forty-seven? “Your brother?” I asked.

She nodded. “Aftran zero four seven of the Katt Dialma Pool, general guard, _halfa_ class, Earth assignment,” she reeled off robotically, like somebody reading from a list of casualties.

Aftran? Like her? “You and your brother have the same name?” I realised that I didn’t know how yeerk naming conventions worked. She must have seen the confusion on my face, because she sighed. “You really don’t know anything, do you?”

“No,” I agreed, sitting across the fire from her. “I don’t.”

“All Aftrans have the same name,” she said, like it was obvious. “We’re Aftrans.”

“Well that’s a lot clearer.”

“Obviously after the… look, do you know how yeerks are born?”

“No,” I said, interested despite myself.

She rolled her eyes and poked at the fire with a stick. “When a yeerk wants to have grubs,” she said in the kind of singsong voice usually used to teach rote concepts to very small children, “it gets together with its _datef_ – its, ah, dance partners, and together they do a special dance and make lots of little grubs!” She looked up at me. I wasn’t sure whether she was playing with me or not, but she was suddenly very serious. “The _tesken_ , the mating dance, is a fusion dance. The three _datef_ join together; I mean, they literally join together, becoming one mass, which disintegrates into hundreds of grubs. And those grubs hatch into yeerks. The parents die, of course.” She was watching my face carefully, I realised, watching for a reaction. I didn’t have to fake my expression of interest.

“You’re not disgusted?” she asked, as if she couldn’t believe it. “You’re not horrified?”

I wasn’t. I’d heard of much grosser reproductive methods than that. I did feel kind of sad for the parents, but that, I knew, was my own anthrocentrism – humans stayed on to care for their children and grandchildren, which was a big part of why death at a young age was so repugnant to us. If dying during reproduction was a normal part of yeerk reproduction, they should have evolved to be fine with it.

I realised suddenly that while merely acknowledging Aftran as a person earlier that morning had just about shaken me to pieces, this discussion didn’t bother me at all. Good old biology. I knew where I was with biology. If I was having such trouble with concepts like murder and personhood, maybe it would be better to approach the yeerk thing from their biology. But to Aftran, I just shrugged and said, “I study animals a lot. I’m used to all sorts of kinds of reproduction.”

She looked uncertain. “Really?”

“There are wasps that lay eggs caterpillars and when the eggs hatch they eat the poor animal from the inside out,” I said.

Her eyes widened. “Right. Well then. I was created in the Aftran _tesken_ , and I was born of the nine hundred and forty-second grub formed. Aftran nine four two.”

“That… makes sense,” I said hesitantly.

“More sense than your human method of just jumbling random syllables together,” she snapped. “No organisation at all. I mean sometimes we get twins, two yeerks who share a grub and share a name, but it’s not a big problem.”

“Nine four two,” I said. “That’s a… high number.”

Aftran glared at me. “So what?”

“Nothing. I just… I don’t have siblings…” I ignored her snort and continued… “but you speak about zero four seven as if he’s your only brother.”

“Like somebody can’t love more than one sibling? I can’t help it if you humans don’t have any sense of empathy.”

I blinked, hard, at the alien invader who was communicating to me through her child slave. “ _We_ don’t have any empathy?”

“It’s like trying to think of more than a handful of people at once wears you out or something. You’re always forgetting each others’ names and never have a clue what’s going on in each others’ lives. Humans can live in the same house as people they don’t care about at all. It’s ridiculous. Your families are tiny and so are your minds.”

I was willing to accept that yeerk brains and emotions worked differently to ours. But still. “Are you saying you have more than nine hundred siblings and for each of them – ”

“Of course not,” she snapped. “I was born of the nine hundred and forty seventh grub. That doesn’t mean nine hundred and forty seven of us hatched.”

I blinked again. “I don’t understand.”

Aftran sighed. “Grub number determines the _glathen_ – the, ah… head ridges, you might call them?” she explained. “Each grub that spawns increases the ridge number by one. Usually. Occasionally there are mistakes, but it usually increases the number by one. My _glathen_ has nine hundred and forty two ridges, and my chemical signature is Aftran. It doesn’t mean all the other grubs hatched as well. Less than one in ten yeerk grubs hatch.”

“So you had…”

“There were ninety two of us,” she said quietly. “It was a big hatching. Normally you get about fifty. We have a saying, you know – ‘the bigger the hatching, the less luck there is to go around’.” She tossed some more wood on the fire. The flamed investigated it cautiously. “Of course, that’s just the yeerks who are _born_. It doesn’t mean they get a chance to grow up.”

I recognised the bitterness in that tone. “What happened?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“To your siblings. Something happened.”

She shrugged. “Life happened. Andalites happened. Our bad luck happened. The Pool ship Katt Dialma got caught in a battle, we lost a quarter of the Pool, including half of Aftran. Some of our Poolmates said we were cursed, a lot of them didn’t want to travel with us anymore. We lost a few to injury and disease and…” she bit her lip, searching for a word… “to not being able to grow properly. Not all yeerks that can’t grow die at birth, some live long enough to be juveniles before their bodies give up. Especially from big hatchings. That might be where the bad luck thing comes from. Anyway, nobody wanted us aboard and it’s bad for too many yeerk siblings to stay together so a lot of us got assigned to Leera and the taxxon homeworld. I lost track of them.”

I swallowed. Had they been on Leera when we’d blown up the continent? Did Aftran know about that?

“One two five displeased Visser Three in some way and lost her head. Ninety nine and Six six three got unlucky in the battle right before we got to the surface of this planet. It was me, and Forty-seven, and Eight two six, and Three one three who made it here and got ourselves established. We were lucky to make it to a safe ground Pool. It’s hard to avoid the andalites in space for too long. We were lucky to have a good space battle tactician like Visser Three here when we arrived. He took down the andalite invaders before they could settle. They say if Visser One was still in charge of this place we’d be on the run from andalites even on the ground, you know.”

I swallowed. “Out of more than ninety of you, three are three of you left? Three?”

Aftran carefully avoided my gaze.

“Eight two six and Three one three were in the Pool when the last ‘andalite bandit’ attack went down,” she said. “The Visser says there was oatmeal contamination. There was no choice but to scrap the Pool. It made a lot of people very angry.”

I could feel my throat tightening. I forced myself to breathe calmly.

“I didn’t know right away,” she continued, sounding almost conversational. “I was with Forty-seven. I slipped away in the confusion. By the time I got back to the Pool, it had already been done.”

I could picture the scene. Aftran in the body of a little girl, covered in hork-bajir blood, taking the Dracon beam from her brother’s host’s hand, wrapping her host’s tiny fingers around it and stalking off after the monster that had slain him… tracking it to the river and being completely unaware of what was happening to her other siblings beneath her very feet until it was too late…

“But,” she said, “there are others, on other planets. As taxxons and so on. One day I might meet some of them again.” She poked at the fire with a stick. Despite its flames, and despite the sun, I felt very cold inside.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, a stupid, useless mantra. It didn’t matter that I was sorry. Aftran rolled Karen’s eyes. She didn’t even look angry or afraid any more. Just resigned.

“Are there… other Yeerk Pools on Earth?” I asked.

Aftran shot me a sharp look. “You think to interrogate me before starving me? No, thank you. I’m not telling you anything about the invasion. If you want to get more of my cousins killed, do it on your own information.”

“Then tell me about yeerks,” I said eagerly. I had to know about these people, I had to know the consequences of what I’d done, what we were doing. For a good cause, yes. To protect the planet, yes. But a bad thing done for a good reason is still a bad thing that was done. I could figure out how justified my actions were later; first, I needed to know what they were.

“What do you want to know?” She sounded annoyed.

“You mate in threes, right? Do you fall in love?” I remembered vaguely Jake telling me, once, that yeerks ‘didn’t do love’. It was one of the few times he spoke of having a yeerk in his brain.

“Everyone has love,” she snapped. “I’m sure even andalites love each other, when they’re not busy running about killing everybody else in the galaxy and calling it a favour. Our emotions aren’t the same as yours, of course. You probably think your love is better. I think mine is better.”

I nodded. I’d been in the body of enough animals to know that emotions weren’t the same for everyone, and the contrast was always really stark with alien morphs.

“What about your hosts?” I asked.

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Your hosts. Ja… uh, my Prince… he had a yeerk in his head for a while. He said they can feel your emotions. So you’d feel your host’s emotions, right?”

She shrugged. “What of it?”

‘ _How can you stand their pain and fear?’_ was probably a question that would shut down the conversation a little fast. Instead I tried, “What is it like?”

She shrugged again. “It’s just host emotions. The body makes chemicals and we read what they mean, just like we read what the connections in the brain tissue mean. The nervous system is adapted to keep the host alive when there’s no yeerk to control it, and of course it doesn’t really know when to _stop_ , because apart from Gedds nothing’s really evolved with us enough yet, so you get all these leftover chemical reactions in the central nervous system that you need to handle so you don’t end out twitching involuntarily or something. Some nervous systems settle better than others.”

I stared. Aftran had just described the concept of a person, of an individual sentient mind, as ‘leftover chemical reactions in the central nervous system’. She’d just talked about people fighting for their own physical freedom as ‘twitching involuntarily’. How could she sit across the fire from me and talk to me like a real person if she didn’t even think of humans as real people?

But then, wasn’t that exactly what I’d been doing to yeerks?

I swallowed. I couldn’t help but notice that her vocabulary had become a lot more advanced for her chemical reaction speech. It was probably something that had been specifically drilled into her, gone over and over and over, using those words. I guess that was one way to create a fighting force that could bear the mental anguish of their slaves screaming in their heads all the time; tell your fighting force that it wasn’t anguish. Tell them it didn’t count. Tell them it was an annoying side effect of a biological machine facing something it hadn’t evolved to deal with.

And it was all the more effective because, technically, that was true. The difference between Karen’s explanation and my perspective of the matter was one little detail: _do hosts count as people_? One little arbitrary designation that let some people torture insects for fun because they didn’t count, or whip horses half to death because they didn’t count, or kill their fellow humans who looked a little different… all you had to do was decide not to care. Decide that they didn’t count.

Somewhere near the start of the war, probably right after Elfangor told us they were evil and around the time we’d watched him get eaten alive, I’d decided that yeerks didn’t count. It seemed like the Yeerk Empire had decided the same thing about us.

And a little voice in my mind whispered, _What if yeerks didn’t decide that? If I could learn, painful and difficult as the lesson was, couldn’t they?_

Carefully, I said, “But they’re people, you know. Your hosts. They’re not just chemical reactions in nervous systems.”

“They _are_ chemical reactions in nervous systems,” Aftran pointed out.

“Yes, but… you’re a nervous system, too, right?”

Aftran shook Karen’s head. “We don’t have nerves. Hosts have nerves.”

Ah. That made things more difficult. A clear ‘us’ vs ‘them’ line like that might be hard to broach.

“Besides, nerves didn’t seem so important to you when you cut through my brother’s host’s spine.”

There was that. I swallowed. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” I said quietly. “I was trying to protect my planet.”

“You protect your people, I protect mine,” she replied with a shrug.

“The people you’re protecting are slavers,” I pointed out coldly. “You’re literally speaking to me right now through a slave.”

“And what would you have us do?” she snapped. “Live our whole lives blind and silent, devoid of meaning? Helpless little slugs swimming back and forth in muck and waiting to die? While you stand among the trees and under the sunlight and run your fingers through a pet’s fur and drink orange juice and laugh with your loved ones? Do you have any idea how lucky you are, to just be able to get up and interact with the world with no effort at all? Why do you get that, and we don’t?”

The words felt rehearsed. I got the feeling they weren’t meant just for me. She’d had this argument before. With who? Karen? I stared hard into the girl’s eyes, trying to see some trace of the human inside, to get some sense of her. But the yeerk’s control was complete.

Instead I said, “You can’t make somebody else a slave just so you can be more free. You can’t take somebody else’s sight just because you don’t want to be blind. It’s not right. What you’re doing is evil.”

“Why? Because we’re parasites? You’re predators; you kill animals and eat their flesh. You slaughter cows and chickens and pigs for your lifestyle. Do you think being a predator is morally superior to being a parasite? At least our prey get to live, when you’re not cutting them to pieces.”

“We don’t eat sentient things,” I snapped. “Humans and hork-bajir and Leerans aren’t pigs.”

“Yes you are.” Karen’s face was twisted with hate and disgust. “That’s all you are to us. Oink, oink.”

I leapt to my feet. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” I was shouting, I realised. “Have you ever had to kill anyone? Have you ever had to wrap your teeth around someone’s throat to protect some stupid secret, have you ever blown up hundreds or thousands in some dumb military manoeuvre? If you don’t know the difference between killing some chicken and doing that, you don’t know anything. And you should just shut up.”

“Then don’t do it,” she said simply. “If you don’t want to kill, don’t kill.”

“That’s what I was doing! And then you had hide out spying on me and to upset some bear and screw everything up!”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

But Aftran was looking up at me, calculating. I think she was putting together bits and pieces she’d seen over the last few days, watching me. I didn’t know exactly how much she had seen. Not our last Animorphs meeting, or she’d have known I was an ‘andalite bandit’ and made her report before we met; not my conversation with Ax out by the horse trough. But she must have seen a lot.

“You were going to run away,” she concluded. “On a horse? Really?”

“No,” I said stiffly. “I was just exercising the horse first.”

“Where exactly were you going to go?”

“Into the mountains. I was going to be a wolf. See, if you stay in morph for more than two hours, you can’t switch back.” I didn’t feel too bad telling her that – it wasn’t exactly a secret among the yeerk forces, and she’d be dead before she had a chance to use it against us anyway. “I was going to run away into the mountains and have no more power to fight this war.”

“How lucky for you to have that choice,” she said coolly, looking back to the fire.

“What?”

“To be able to leave. The longer it takes us to set up planetary Pools, the more of our cousins die in space. And we can’t just leave it to some other yeerk because we’re tied to the Pools. There’s nowhere for a yeerk to run _to_. We can borrow all the legs and eyes in the galaxy and it doesn’t let us run away.”

“You can stay in your Pools,” I pointed out. “You don’t have to steal legs and eyes at all. All you need is the Pool and the Kandrona. You don’t need slaves to survive. You don’t need to conquer and kill to survive.”

“ _Survival_ isn’t _living_.” Aftran was getting angry again. “You’d have us lead lives of meaningless silence away from the world while you guys get to live in it with no effort? Don’t we have the right to live? Don’t we have the right to explore, to expand? _You_ don’t have to think about this sort of stuff. _You_ don’t have to live with having to put in an effort every day, having to risk your survival just to be alive. _You_ were born free and beautiful; not some slug like us, so shut up!”

I stood, frozen, twin trains of thought running through my head on a possible collision course. The stupid one said, _She called you beautiful. Not ‘hot for a fat chick’ or ‘pretty for a black girl’; beautiful, with no qualifiers, and she meant it. Pity the only person who thinks that is a brain slug you have to kill_.

The actually useful train of thought said, _Why would a being be so hateful of its own species? Why would they idolise a species that’s so different instead? Humans sometimes got up on their high horses and lamented how destructive their species was or some such thing, but we rarely had such venom for our own form or our own senses. I love seeing the violet sky a bird sees, but not so much that I’d invade the galaxy over it. What’s wrong with a yeerk’s natural senses? Shouldn’t their natural state be comfortable to them?_

My mouth said, “It’s still wrong.”

“It’s Survival of the Fittest!” she snarled at me. “The law of the jungle, kill or be killed! It’s no different to what you lot do, killing and enslaving from each other – at least we don’t do it to our own kind!”

“Okay,” I said, “I am starting to get really tired of that line. It seems like everywhere I turn, people are trying to justify their horrible deeds or push me into horrible deeds or force pacifist aliens to do horrible deeds with the justification of ‘oh, it’s Survival of the Fittest’. And to you know what all of those people have in common? Hmm?”

Aftran hesitated, then shook Karen’s head.

“What all of these people have in common is that they have no idea what that phrase means. They don’t know a damn thing about evolution and they think they can just wave platitudes like that around like a talisman that magically makes everything okay because they don’t have any real arguments. Well, you know what? I _do_ know what that phrase means, and it doesn’t mean what you seem to think it does.” I found a sharp bit of rock and went to sit next to her. “Pay attention,” I told her as I scratched a design in the moss and dirt.

“To what? What are we doing?”

“I’m going to show you a teeny-tiny bit of what that phrase you just used means,” I replied. “I’m going to show you a teeny-tiny bit of the meaning of life.”


	10. Chapter 10

“The first thing that’s important to remember,” I explained to the alien who was getting a biology lesson whether she liked it or not, “is that there’s no moral implications attached to evolution. Saying ‘we get to kill and enslave, because of Survival of the Fittest!’ would be dumb even if that was what it meant; it would be like saying ‘I get to throw babies off cliffs, because gravity!’”

I was painstakingly scratching a square into the dirt on our rock platform as I spoke. Aftran seemed interested enough in what I was doing not to tell me to shut up, so I continued. “But it’s twice as dumb as that, because that’s not what the phrase means. The biggest and strongest and cruellest aren’t the ‘fittest’. The ‘fittest’ depends on context. I mean, yeah, sometimes the biggest and meanest win, if that’s your niche, but I can’t help noticing that all the aliens I’ve met who are out exploring and stuff are social; humans, yeerks, hork-bajir, Leerans, andalites.” I hesitated. I didn’t know about the taxxons. Were they social? I left them out for simplicity. “The whole ‘meanest wins’ thing is really rare in the animal kingdom, and it’s almost non-existent in social animals, genetically. It can sometimes work for a little while but it doesn’t tend to hold up over time. Most of the time, being the ‘fittest’ isn’t about taking things from others.” I stopped to inspect my work. I’d bisected my square horizontally and vertically, to make a little 2x2 table. I looked at Karen. Aftran. “Do you know anything about game theory?”

She bunched up her nose. “What, like monopoly?”

I resisted the urge to sigh. It wouldn’t be fair of me to expect a girl of about eight or an alien invader to know anything about human math and strategy puzzles. If I hadn’t been going out of my way to learn as much biology as possible, I wouldn’t have known.

“No, not like monopoly. Game theory is the study of different types of strategies that can be boiled down to cost-benefit analyses.” She might not know those words either. “It’s studying strategy with math,” I explained. “Different scenarios are called ‘games’. The one I’m going to show you is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma.” I eyed Aftran for a moment. “This might be a bit advanced for your host, but you’re a smart alien invader, you’ll figure it out.

“Imagine this. Two people, Alice and Bob, were arrested for an armed robbery. They don’t know each other very well. It makes no difference whether they did it or not. The police put them in separate interrogation rooms where they can’t talk to each other. Alice and Bob each have to decide whether to confess to the crime or to stay silent. Whether to cooperate with each other, or defect to the police. Let’s label the columns of this table with Alice’s choices, and the rows with Bob’s.”

I scratched C and D, for Cooperate and Defect, above the two columns, and then before each of the two rows. I added an A for Alice and a B for Bob so that things wouldn’t get confusing. I glanced at her to make sure she understood the layout – it was perfectly possible that yeerks didn’t organise information in tables like we did. But Aftran nodded, so I went on.

“Now, the police have enough evidence to convict them for stealing the getaway car, but not quite enough for the robbery. So they approach each privately, and make an offer – if they confess to seeing the other one commit the robbery, they’ll be let off for the car-stealing. The one to defect and turn in their partner will get off scott free and the other will go to jail for ten years for both crimes. So, if Alice defects, she does zero years in jail. Let’s use this table to chart Alice’s choices.” I put my stone to the D column and C row and wrote ‘0’. “If Bob is the one to defect, he goes free and Alice goes to jail.” I wrote ‘10’ in the C column and D row. “If they both stay silent, they both go to jail for stealing the car, as the police promised. The sentence for that is two years.” I wrote ‘2’ in the C column and C row. “If they both defect, they’re both off for the car theft… but both go to jail for the armed robbery, a sentence of seven years.” I wrote ‘7’ in the remaining column. Then I looked at my work. I was pretty sure I’d gotten the numbers right. It had made perfect sense when I’d read it, but back-calculating was a bit more difficult. Aftran was clearly better at math than me, because she was nodding impatiently for me to continue.

“So,” I said, “the question is, what should Alice do if she wants to stay out of jail?”

“Defect,” Aftran said immediately.

“And Bob?”

“The same.”

“But then they both go to jail for seven years. If they’d cooperated, they could’ve only gone to jail for two.”

“That’s only true if they can control each others’ actions,” Aftran countered. “Alice doesn’t know what Bob’s going to do. If Bob cooperates, it’s better for Alice to defect because she can avoid jail. If Bob defects, it’s better for Alice to defect too so she can get out quicker.”

I nodded. Aftran had reached the proper logical conclusion, but it was unnerving to see such a little girl do that so _fast_. Aftran could very well be older than me. She certainly seemed to be smarter.

“Right,” I continued. “Now, this Prisoner’s Dilemma pattern doesn’t have to be about prison. It can be about risking your life, or even positive things like money and food. And it shows up a lot in nature. There are situations where animals can choose to share food or territory, or groom each other, or trust each other, that fit the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Not everything fits the game, and there are hundreds of other common games, but Prisoner’s Dilemma is a good example. And biologists who were watching animals were noticing that animals didn’t always defect like, logically, they should. Sometimes they did, but they were cooperating an awful lot, even with strangers. If always defecting was the best strategy, then the ‘fittest’ animals were the defectors; other behaviour should have been wiped out. But there’s this thing that game theorists do, right, where people build computer programs to play these games with each other and see which program, which strategy, is the best. So they designed one for Prisoner’s Dilemma, and invited computer programmers to play.

“It goes like this – programs are paired up randomly to play iterations of Prisoner’s Dilemma with each other and order points according to the table. In this table, obviously the one with the least amount of points would be the winner, but it’s easy to reverse the table if you want the most points to win. They play a random number of iterations of the game against that opponent, and then they’re randomly paired up with another opponent for the next round and play a random number of iterations once more. This happens for several more rounds, and the program with the least or most amount of points, as appropriate, is the best strategy, evolutionarily speaking. This might be the best strategy for vampire bats deciding to share blood, or meerkats deciding to groom each other, or all sorts of things. Of course, actual biology is more complicated, but it’s a good start. You understand?”

Aftran nodded. I was glad. I wasn’t sure I could keep the concept straight through a second explanation.

“There was a program in there called Always Defect. It did really badly. Always Cooperate didn’t do great either; it was too easy to take advantage of. There were lots of very complex programs in there, all designed to outsmart each other by trying to trick the other program into cooperating while they defected. They were very clever. Do you know what the winning strategy was?”

Aftran didn’t answer, which I took to mean ‘no’.

“The winner,” I said, “was called Tit For Tat. Tit For Tat was a very simple program. All it did was this: in the first game of the round, it would Cooperate. In all the other games, it would do whatever its opponent just did in the previous iteration. If its opponent is cooperating, Tit For Tat cooperates. If its opponent plays defect, Tit For Tat defects the next game. And we see this in nature all the time; for example, vampire bats live on the edge of starvation, and missing one meal can mean life or death. But if a vampire bat is hungry, its neighbour will share blood with it. Then, if the neighbour is hungry the next night, it expects blood back. A vampire bat who doesn’t share back, who ‘defects’, is refused blood the next time they are hungry; the bat shares with someone else instead.

“This competition was repeated a little while later, and Tit For Tat was beaten. The new winner was Tit For Two Tats; a program just like Tit For Tat except that it ‘forgave’ the first defect play and didn’t retaliate unless an opponent did it a second time. From there, it’s really just a game of how kind and forgiving is the right amount of kind and forgiving. We see this in games other than Prisoner’s Dilemma, too; among social animals, the ‘fittest’ strategy is usually to be fairly kind and fairly forgiving, but not quite a pushover. We see this written in our genes, in the legacies left to us by generations of ancestors who proved themselves ‘fit’ in this way – our capacity for compassion and pity, for love and forgiveness. Or, you know, whatever analogues yeerks have.”

Aftran rolled Karen’s eyes. “So you’re saying everyone should be all sweet and loving and have tea parties.”

“I’m not saying anyone _should_ do anything; evolution doesn’t work that way. I’m saying people usually _are_ sweet and loving with tea parties, because that’s what works, although of course reality is a bit more complicated. But that’s just an interesting side point; I haven’t gotten to the cool part of the story yet.”

“Well, I am riveted.”

I decided to ignore that sarcasm so that I could keep talking about game theory. “The best part,” I pointed out, “is that it’s mathematically impossible for Tit For Tat to ever beat a single opponent.”

Aftran frowned at me, puzzled.

“Think about it,” I continued. “The only way to score more than your opponent if to Defect when they Cooperate. Tit For Tat, or Tit For Two Tats or any of its other children, can’t Defect more often than an opponent. The best they can possibly do is tie.”

“But you said Tit For Tat beats everyone.”

“No, I said Tit For Tat won. It wins the war, so to speak, without winning a single battle.” I smiled.

“That doesn’t make any sense. How can it do better than everyone if it does better than no one?”

“Because you’re missing the big picture. Remember, in this competition – as in nature – hundreds of these games are being played all the time, between dozens of programs, that are constantly being paired up with new programs. Most programmers fell right into a trap of human thinking (and, I suspect, yeerk thinking); they forgot that the aim was to do as well as possible, and instead built their programs to do better than their opponents. This is a really good way to lose. See, Tit For Tat and its children aren’t pushovers like Always Cooperate, but because they’re not trying to ‘trick’ their opponents by sneaking in more defections, they tend to play rounds that have less overall defections. Yes, they don’t beat their opponent, but both they and their opponent do a lot better than they would if they were trying to. Meanwhile, all the other programs playing against each other may or may not win their rounds, but both they and their opponents tend to score badly, because they’re trying to out-defect each other. Tit For Tat plays rounds against a lot of opponents and tends to score well in most of them; opponent score at least as well against Tit For Tat, but then run off to play against somebody else and score low, while Tit For Tat is still scoring high. It doesn’t have to beat anyone to do better than everyone. You can’t take what looks like a good idea on a small scale and scale it up and still expect it to be the best way to do things; nature is more complicated than that. If you play one round of Prisoner’s Dilemma against one opponent, the only sensible thing to do is defect. If you play many rounds, it’s sensible to cooperate a bit but still try to ‘cheat’ them. If you play many rounds against many opponents, like in nature, you don’t have to beat anybody to do the best. The bigger scale you go, the nicer it pays off to be.

“This is the mistake that people keep making when they throw out lines like ‘survival of the fittest’ to justify things they can’t justify themselves. Usually, that means they don’t know what they’re talking about, that they’re operating on the small-minded mental bias that makes people assume that you can only gain something if somebody else loses it. But nature doesn’t work like that, evolution doesn’t work like that, and technology doesn’t work like that. Nature might motivate us to fight and kill, but nature also motivates us to be helpful and merciful. It makes no sense to fight off our better instincts by claiming that they somehow don’t count as evolutionary tools simply because we haven’t thought through the situation properly.”

Aftran raised Karen’s brows. “Uppity words for a murderer.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“What, no excuses?”

“No point, is there? I’ve done what I’ve done, and there are no other options but what I’m doing now.”

“And yet you’re going to escape the consequences by running away to be a wolf in the mountains.”

I shrugged.

“What would the other ‘andalite bandits’ do in this situation?”

“You’d be dead if any of them were here,” I explained. “You and Karen, I mean.”

“Well then, I guess it all works out for you, doesn’t it? You get to feel all righteous in killing one person instead of two, safe in the knowledge that your friends won’t come looking and interrupt us.”

I shot her a puzzled look.

“Because they think you’re in the mountains?” she explained. “That’s where you were running to, right? They have no reason to think you ended up out here with me instead.”

I looked at the fire, avoiding her gaze.

“You didn’t tell them?” Aftran asked, the disbelief evident in her voice. “You didn’t leave a note or anything? You were going to let them believe you’d just vanished with no explanation?”

“I didn’t really think…”

“Since when do you need to think to _communicate with your team_?” she asked, exasperated. “What about your parents? I guess they’ll set them straight.”

“My, uh, my parents don’t know anything,” I admitted.

Aftran blinked. “What?”

I shrugged. “It’s not their problem.”

“It’s not their problem that their daughter up and disappeared and they don’t know why? Do they even know about the war?”

“Of course they don’t know about the war!”

“So you could die at any time and they wouldn’t know?!”

“Why do you care? You don’t even have parents!”

“You think I don’t know how parents work?! I’ve had more parents than you, you moderately smart monkey, and I have mentors and superiors and all sorts of people who I have to worry about every day in this war zone and you’re telling me that the two guardians given to you by nature and genetically predisposed to love you are just cut out of your life _by choice_?!”

I realised I’d scooted away from her. There was some kind of fury in her tone that I couldn’t understand. But still, she was right. My parents must be frantic. How long would they search before they gave up hope? The Animorphs must already think I was dead; they had no reason to think I wouldn’t just fly home otherwise.

But that didn’t mean she could glare at me like that. She had no idea, _no idea_ what I was dealing with. Maybe her life hadn’t been going so great either (I hadn’t actually lost any family members, I had to admit), but her problems were different than mine and she didn’t know what she was talking about.

“What should I have done?” I snapped. “’Hi, Mom, and by the way, we’re being invaded by slaver aliens and I almost die fighting them on a regular basis’? Should I tell them and leave them as loose ends that could be taken by the yeerks at any time? Tell them and leave them sitting up all night worrying if I’m coming home from our latest mission? Tell them and have them stop me from ever going into the field again?”

“I though you didn’t want to go into the field again,” Aftran said, her voice soft and somehow triumphant. “I thought Cassie the Compassionate Killer was running away.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She cocked Karen’s head with a small smile. “You’re not afraid for them, are you? You’re afraid of them seeing you for who you are.”

“Now you’re just making stuff up. They have every reason to be proud of me.”

“Proud of their little girl with the blood on her hands? Proud of their murderer who comes home to patch up the animals that are worth more of her time than the sentient beings who died for being in the way? When they lean over and kiss you goodnight and wish you sweet dreams, I bet you smile back and hope the nightmares don’t show, don’t you, Cassie? I bet you hide your hands under the sheets and fret about whether there’s still any blood on them and don’t let a tear form in your eye while you smile back and pretend to still be a human girl and not a _monster_.”

It was only long-ingrained pacifism and the memory of Marco’s shocked expression that stopped me from slapping the helpless little girl in front of me. (That was a problem. The urge to lash out in anger like that was a serious problem, one I’d have to deal with if I hadn’t been running off to be a wolf.) I held myself immobile, my lip curling into a snarl, long enough to notice the tears forming in her eyes. That gave me pause; enough pause to realise that while parents didn’t come and kiss their teenage daughters goodnight, they very well might with a girl who looked about seven or eight.

Aftran wasn’t talking about me.

That’s what the yeerks did, wasn’t it? Pretended to be someone else, hid behind innocent eyes while plotting to betray everybody around them. They suppressed a little girl’s screaming and struggling and smiled into the adoring eyes of their hosts’ parents while planning how to drag them, screaming and begging, down to that pool and turn them into a puppet who didn’t even own their own bodies. I guess that had contributed to my perception of yeerks as unquestionably evil. Good people didn’t do things like that. Good people couldn’t stand something like that. To do that, one had to be evil deep inside, surely.

Good people didn’t throw their enemies to the ground and cut their throats just because they were in the way. Good people didn’t worry about whether they’d killed before or after the order to retreat, whether they had committed murder, because they didn’t walk the line of a murderer and play word games to justify their actions. Maybe the yeerks were evil. Maybe I was evil. Fine. But…

But if good people couldn’t stand to do those things, then good people couldn’t stand to invite friends over to make drugs for chemical warfare when their parents were out, or charge blindly into battle and eviscerate enemies with their bear claws, or maul the eyes of slaves over and over again from the sky, or blow up half a continent, or give orders to kill and hurt again and again without letting the pain ever show for more than a moment. And I might not know how lost I was, but I knew that my friends, my fellow Animorphs – or _th_ e Animorphs, I guessed, since I wasn’t an Animorph any more – were just kids defending their planet. They were worthy of a life, of happiness, of redemption if they felt they needed it. And they did horrible things day after day out of sheer desperation.

If they were worthy of peace and safety and redemption, how could I call the yeerks irredeemably evil for their actions? How could I look at one group acting in desperation and call them angels and another group acting in desperation and call them demons, and think that was anything more than bias on my part, some kind of interstellar racism? (Speciesism?)

My heart thundered in my ears, my muscles shook. Adrenalin from my anger, from our argument. But I could feel it turning into something else. A new kind of excitement, rushing through me. A new _plan_. An almost stupidly obvious plan.

When desperation drove people to do horrible things, you didn’t fix the problem by killing everyone involved. You fixed the problem by dealing with the source of desperation.

Could humans and yeerks live in peace? Proper peace? I didn’t know how yet, but surely that was a better thing to channel my energies into than constant war, right? _Tit for tat. Don’t try to score higher than your opponent. Play to make the game high-scoring for everyone_.

For the first time I could remember, I felt… hope. Not ‘someday this nightmare will end’ kind of hope; real hope. That little thrill that there was a direction to go, a way for things to improve, a way for the world to be better – not just to bear through the current problems, but to come out better than ever before. There was potential for the world, potential for this war; real potential.

I was struck with the memory of Prince Elfangor’s ship landing in that old abandoned construction site, of the thrill that went through me, the energy that took battle and pain and desperation to temper and whittle down to nothing. The feeling surrounding that simple, wonderful fact that echoed in my minds: _aliens are real. Intelligent extraterrestrial life is real_.

I looked at the alien before me, or at least the girl it was living in. The biological marvel that could somehow interface with the brain tissue of different species from different parts of the galaxy, a wonder of nature that surpassed the abilities of every mind controller on Earth to such a degree that they didn’t even deserve the title.

I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t save Aftran. She was an enemy who knew far too much. But I might be able to save people like her, and people like Karen. I might be able to do something other than kill. If I knew enough. One more life on my conscience. No coward’s way out this time; no ‘they’re space slugs so it doesn’t count’, no ‘they were evil anyway’, no letting death after death blur together. I would remember Aftran, I was sure of that. I would carry the weight of that death – that execution – for the rest of my life. A small price to pay, if I might help people.

“What’s Karen’s family like?” I asked, trying to find a way into a ‘tell me everything you know about your people’ conversation without sounding too abrupt.

Aftran had looked confused while I had my little revelation, but at that, Karen’s eyes darkened. “Why do you care?”

I shrugged. “We’re stuck out here. Just making conversation.”

“You want to make conversation? I’m not your friend, Cassie. I’m not the big bad lion who just had thorn stuck in his paw and you’re going to pull it out so we can be buddies. You killed most of my family in your anti-yeerk ploy and then murdered the remainder for no reason, just cut his throat right in front of me. And we’re out here because you’re killing me, because you don’t want any of us to live, but you won’t do it mercifully, oh no; you’re here to watch me starve to death in agony rather than grow a blade and face up to the murderer you are. If you expect me to sit here and make nice while you wipe us out then you’ve got another thing coming.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. What was I supposed to say to that? Start another round of ‘You started it’? Aftran hadn’t started it, her government had. Or military. Or whoever made the invasion decisions for yeerks. And I didn’t actually know how complicit she was in the whole thing. I didn’t know how complicit any of the yeerks were, except obviously for Visser Three. I’d never bothered to try to find out. They could be a united front here to claim the Earth for their Empire with no worries. They could be a seething pool of rebel groups held together through fear of execution by Visser Three’s tailblade. They could be anything in between and I had absolutely no idea. I didn’t know enough of their culture, their psychology, their biology, to even hazard any kind of guess. Everything I knew about yeerks was about how to kill them.

What was I supposed to say?

I got up.

“I’m going to see if I can find more food,” I said. “Shout if there’s trouble.”

And I headed off into the trees to be alone with my thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those interested, the Tit For Tat program and its evolutionary implications are better explained in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins than they are by Cassie. (This is an extremely good book that anybody interested in biology should read.)


	11. Chapter 11

“What do you think happens after we die?”

I bit my lip as I considered the question. It had taken me three hours to find the squirrel I’d skinned and tossed on the fire between us, plenty of time to cool down and think. An embarrassing amount of time, for someone who could morph. Maybe I needed Tobias to give me some hunting tips.

“I’m not sure,” I told Aftran. “I’ve never really thought about it.” Which was a lie – of course I’d thought about it, everyone thought about it. I’d concluded years ago that there was no afterlife and nothing to go there. But that was before I’d morphed, before I’d been given proof of a mind that could work outside a brain. It was before I’d met the Ellimist, capable of bending space and time and life itself to his whim, and known that he was almost certainly not alone in that ability.

Besides, I didn’t think ‘you die and you’re gone forever’ was a particularly comforting answer for somebody so close to it.

“What do you think?” I asked. “What do yeerks believe about death?”

“What do yeerks believe,” she muttered. “Might as well say ‘what do humans believe’? We’re not all the same, you know.”

“You know what I meant.”

Aftran sighed. “A person is a… a pattern, made up of two kinds of spirit that knit together,” she explained. “We call them _kandhan_ and _ravhan_ , the sunlight spirit and the lightning spirit, or the body spirit and the mind spirit. Every yeerk is a temporary marriage of _kandhan_ and _ravhan_ and life is a process of passing these on. _Kandhan_ is the physical being, passed body to body, merged in parents and passed to grubs. Every surviving grub is a miracle, a triumph of healthy _kandhan_. _Ravhan_ is passed mind to mind, stronger but more mutable, a sharing of the being not transferred in the dance but in conversation, in teaching skills, in sharing thoughts and philosophies. _Kandhan_ and _ravhan_ live on in the Pool, in our siblings and cousins and children of the body and mind. That they are united in a single yeerk only for a short period of time is not considered important enough to muse about. If a yeerk does not wish to die, they need only to pass themselves on.”

 _Not important enough to muse about? Not until you met humans, huh? Not until our individualism got under your skin_. I could see the fear in her eyes. Aftran didn’t want to die.

“Does a host have _kandhan_ and _ravhan_?” I asked.

Aftran rolled Karen’s eyes. “You sound like a newly hatched grub,” she muttered.

“How so?”

“Crystals reproduce their physical forms. Does that give them _kandhan_? Computers can store and process data, does that give them _ravhan_? Of course not. Just because something has a behaviour that looks a bit like us doesn’t mean that thing is properly alive. A host or a computer or a piece of paper can be used to transfer information from yeerk to yeerk, but it doesn’t mean the information is alive in the meantime. People who go on and say things like ‘oh, we need to respect the _ravhan_ of our hosts, we can’t just go around stealing people’ are just immature revolutionaries who need to actually sit down and think.”

Her words echoed in my head. _People who go on and say things like ‘oh, we need to respect the_ ravhan _of our hosts’_. Respect hosts? Did she mean that there were yeerks who were against slavery, who believed that hosts had a right to freedom? It sure sounded like it. I supposed it shouldn’t have surprised me – there was no reason that yeerk culture should be a monolith. There were always doubters and pacifists and rebels in human wars. Why wouldn’t there be in yeerk war?

Well, well.

I didn’t voice my thoughts. Instead I said, “Have you noticed how every time you talk about hosts, your words start to sound really rehearsed?”

“It’s called being educated.”

I thought about the differences between the American history I’d learned in school and the American history my great-grandmother had taught me, about the venom and disgust in Ax’s mental voice when he hissed _< yeerk>_ and talked about the duties of a warrior.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I guess it is.”

There was a pause.

“You can do it with me,” I blurted out. “If you want to.”

Aftran narrowed Karen’s eyes. “What do you mean, do it with you?”

“When you… when…” I sighed and looked away. “We don’t have long left,” I said. “A day at most. But… but Jake, my leader, he had a yeerk die in his head once. He said you get… stuff. Memories, ideas, pieces of their mind. I’m not a yeerk, but there are no yeerks here for you to talk to. I might not have a _ravhan_ , but in the absence of better options… I mean, if we lose this war, my mind might very well go to another yeerk, right?”

Silence. I risked a glance up. Aftran was watching me shrewdly. Her expression was very difficult to read.

“Never mind,” I muttered. “It was a stupid idea.”

“No,” she said. “No, it wasn’t. I… I would like that.” She thought about that. “I mean, I would prefer that. To the alternative.”

“It’s settled, then.”

“About half a day,” she said.

“What?”

“In about half a day, the fugue starts. Then we have… three to four hours, perhaps, before it’s over. I suppose you don’t want to transfer until the last moment, in case I try to make a dash for the Pool with you or something.”

I nodded and swallowed. It had to have occurred to her that she could fake it early, get into my head before the fugue started and steal my body. But I didn’t think she was lying. I was pretty sure that she really did have about half a day. And it seemed like I owed her that level of trust, at least. “Then it’s settled,” I said. “And I… I’m sorry.”

“It’s cute how you keep saying that like it matters,” she replied.

“Hey, you were the one who decided to spy on me from the forest and somehow upset a bear,” I pointed out. “That bear would have killed – hang on, why have you been spying on me?”

“Because I thought you were an andalite bandit, duh? And I was right.”

“No, I get that. But if you suspected me, why not just drag me off to the Pool? Worst-case scenario, you still get a new host. Or even my fam – wait, did you turn my parents into Controllers?!”

“No, I did not turn your parents into Controllers,” Aftran said, rolling Karen’s eyes. “I wanted to be sure before I turned you in.”

“Why? Afraid of a Visser Three beheading if you were wrong?”

“I don’t report to Visser Three,” she said coolly. “Unless the yeerks find us within the next half-day or so. Then I guess I’ll be getting a promotion.”

“Maybe they’ll give me to you,” I said. “Make me your host.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. A morpher like you would have a combat position. I hate combat. Besides, I’ve had enough of young, female hosts. They’re too emotional, their heads too filled up with – ” she cut off and stared at the cooking meat.

Too what? Too filled up with what? Sharing headspace with a yeerk must be horrible, but what was it like for them to share headspace with a human?

“You didn’t want to turn me in if I was ‘innocent’,” I said, voicing the suspicion even as it occurred to me. “You didn’t want to condemn another girl to this.” I gestured at her, at Karen, with one hand.

“A mistake, it seems,” Aftran practically spat, “that’s costing me my life.”

“Right, of course, you’re the victim. While you sit there behind the eyes of one innocent girl feeling all righteous for not immediately turning in someone who might be another.”

“Don’t tell me how I feel,” she snapped. “I didn’t choose Karen. I transferred from guard work because I didn’t like fighting, and this is what they gave me. It was a promotion, if you must know.”

“A promotion. To a small human child.”

“The only child of the owner of Unibank. So, yeah, don’t think I don’t have power just because I can’t carve things up with my wrist-blades or teeth or tail.”

“She says, sitting injured in the forest.”

“I should’ve just turned you in first chance I had and listened to you scream, andalite bandit or not. Can you imagine it, walking down that pier? I bet you think you can, but you can’t. You’ve never been dragged onto – ”

“Don’t try to tell me what I have and haven’t done,” I said quietly. I didn’t want to think about that pier. It gave me enough nightmares already.

Karen’s eyes widened. “You were a Controller?” Aftran asked.

I shook my head. “Didn’t get that far. I’ve been on that pier twice, but never left with a yeerk. The second time I had backup, a plan of attack. It was the first that was the problem.”

“What did you do?”

“Got rescued. At the last minute.” _And got a colleague trapped in the body of a hawk in the process_.

“That was your plan? Get rescued?”

“No, my plan was to breathe.”

She frowned. “Breathe?”

“There are no suicide prevention methods on the cages or anything. I figured it mustn’t be something they dealt with much. I struggled and screamed and looked like I was resisting, but my plan was to let the guards force my head into the sludge and then breathe in, drown myself, before they could force their filth – I mean, before they could learn what I knew.”

“Is that always your go-to plan? Die or run away?”

“I don’t always plan to die or run away,” I objected, pushing the memories of all the ‘let-me-die-before-I’m-taken’ suicide pacts I’d made with the Animorphs from my mind.

“You were literally going to run off into the mountains and be a wolf.”

“Well, I was… having a bad day.”

Aftran rolled Karen’s eyes. “A bad day. Wow. I can’t possibly imagine.”

I ignored that remark to check on the meat. It was burnt on the outside and not obviously bleeding on the inside, so I pronounced it done and pulled it apart. Marco was going to laugh himself sick at how useless I was at living off the land. Tree-hugging nature-lover Cassie, who can’t even cook a squirrel on a campfire.

Actually he would probably be too busy being grossed out that I was eating squirrel. But whatever.

“I’m going to need to fetch more water soon,” I said, chewing on a burnt leg. (As before, I was making sure Karen got most of the squirrel. I could afford to skip more meals than she could.) “It’d be better to go while it’s still light. Are you alright on your own for a little while? I could move you to a tree or -- ”

“What, so if I’m attacked I’m already pre-stuck? I’ll be fine down here, thanks.”

“You’re awfully confident for somebody who was attacked by a leopard yesterday.”

“Yeah, well, now I can wave a burning branch in its face.”

I hesitated. I wasn’t sure how much a burning branch could protect and injured girl in the forest. But then, I fully intended to sweep the area before I left, and she shouldn’t really be in all that much danger. If she felt safe, so much the better. Ideally I’d like to carry her with me in hork-bajir morph, but I really didn’t think I was going to have much luck convincing her to hold on to the form I had killed her brother in.

I almost considered pressing our luck, seeing if we could just go without water. Was dehydration more of a risk to an injured little girl than predators? In the end I checked for dangerous scents, found none, and resolved to make the trip as quickly as possible.

And as I dropped from the trees in my hork-bajir morph and stooped to fill our little makeshift buckets, I learned that it was a very good thing I did.


	12. Chapter 12

The river water had mostly subsided, and it seemed to be flowing normally. Of course, since I knew very little about rivers and didn’t know if looking alright meant anything, I took care as I filled the buckets. I’d need to demorph soon, then remorph to make the trip back; it should be a shorter trip than two hours through the trees, but I wanted to be careful. I did not want to be stuck forever in Jara Hamee’s body.

I was filling the last bucket when I heard something. Something very, very wrong. I froze, listened. It took me a moment to figure out what it was.

A voice. A human voice. Male, adult.

I pulled myself up into the trees, remembering to take my buckets up with me. It wasn’t long before they appeared; three humans and a hork-bajir, making their way up the riverbank, scanning the ground. Searching. The man in front, the one who was talking, held something that looked a bit like a calculator in front of him.

“Lost it again!” he snapped, and swore. “Now it’s half a mile East. Must be damaged. We wouldn’t have this problem with proper tech.”

“Do we change the sweep, sir?” asked one of the others, a much younger man. He had a Dracon beam sticking out of his backpack, I noticed.

“No, Helan’s team is there. We stay on our route. They’ll see the change and deal with it. Running off like this, I’m about ready to behead the girl myself…”

I squinted at the device in his hands, trying to see. The face of it was made of a large screen covered in green lines; some kind of map? A red dot blinked near the top of the screen.

Some kind of electronic tracker. Had to be.

The yeerks were tracking Aftran.

The group passed, and I demorphed and grew wings as quietly as possible. They didn’t seem jumpy enough to be expecting andalite bandits, so it should be safe to fly. I pulled my osprey body up above the trees with strong wingbeats, caught a thermal, and sighted our camp.

It wasn’t hard. There was a thin but distinctive column of smoke rising from our campsite. More smoke than there should have been. Aftran was trying to build a signal.

I didn’t head straight back, but instead did a circuit around the campsite to scout from the air. There were a few more groups, about three humans to a hork-bajir, all armed. Apparently the daughter of the owner of Unibank had enough value for a full-on search mission. No Bug fighters, though. I guessed that hork-bajir could disappear into the trees, but Bug fighters, which didn’t seem to be able to cloak near the ground, were a whole other level of noticeable.

I took note of the searchers’ positions and wheeled around to head for Aftran. She was by the fire, feeding it wood. Wet wood. She must have dampened it in advance. No wonder she’d been so calm – she still hoped to be rescued. I needed to stop underestimating her.

I demorphed out of her sight, grabbed my clothed from where I’d stashed them (no time to get dressed), and marched into the clearing.

“Where,” I growled, “is the tracker? Where is it?”

Karen’s face lit up in a bright, hopeful smile. “They found us?”

I held out my hand. “Tracker. Now.”

She handed it over. “The stupid thing’s broken, anyway.”

“Well, now it’s even more broken.” I dropped it into the fire. “We’re leaving. You do not want to struggle or scream. Trust me on this.” I pulled her into my arms, ignoring my muscles protesting at her weight. I’d carried her just fine a couple of days before. My muscles were lying to me.

It’s extremely irresponsible to just leave a campfire burning in the forest, but we didn’t have time to douse it properly. It was fairly safe and the yeerks would find it. We needed to get out of there.

“What’ll you do if I do scream?” Aftran asked. “Kill me? Oh, no. How horrible.”

“Shut up, you,” I growled. Southeast. I needed to head southeast. I could slip between two patrols and… and… should I be in hork-bajir morph for this? Maybe. Being human might stop them from shooting on sight, might make them assume I was a random girl, but then they’d just take me to the Pool and I’d be defenceless. But if I was a hork-bajir, they’d know I was an ‘andalite bandit’, or think I was Jara Hamee… did the yeerks as a whole know about the freed hork-bajir being alive? Or was that still a secret? Didn’t matter. The point was, they’d know I wasn’t one of them. I couldn’t fake that. Being human gave me time; but then, being hork-bajir would give me speed…

“What are you going to do, Cassie?” Aftran asked. “Outrun them? The Empire is bigger, stronger, more connected, and you’re alone.”

“So are you, without your siblings,” I snapped. That remark was way below the belt, I knew. Aftran’s eyes narrowed.

“I don’t need shared _kandhan_ with my Pool to have a Pool, little bandit,” she snarled. The look of anger, of hate, on Karen’s face looked so… wrong. No little girl should live a life that required that expression.

“Your Pool is evil!” I snapped. “Your Empire is evil, a race of… of conquerors and slavers, nothing but a plague on the galaxy.”

“Not so friendly when you’re losing, I see,” Aftran sneered. “Is Cassie mad that her victim didn’t just keel over and die? It’s easy to be nice and moralising when you have all the power, isn’t it? When you’re born into a world of splendour and beauty and someone born without it who dares to try for it is at your mercy, you can lecture and kill and walk away feeling all high and mighty. No wonder people think you’re andalites. You act exactly like them.”

“I take that as a compliment.”

“Yeah, someone like you probably would. You humans, with your tiny families and your tiny world and all that sensory potential that you squander on your tiny, pointless lives, not understanding what it’s like to have to strive for the luxury of being a part of the world. You’re always so judging, like you have the right to look down on us, because we’re just – ”

It struck me that Aftran’s words didn’t seem to be for me. Or at least, not only me. Who, then? Who was she railing against? What other humans had spoken so to her?

I stopped walking.

“Karen,” I breathed. “She pities you, doesn’t she? Your host.”

Before Aftran could respond, something else struck me. Unfortunately, that something else was a leopard.


	13. Chapter 13

The utterly ludicrous thought that crossed my mind as I felt the weight on my back was _I so do not have time for this_.

I was dead, of course. I could feel the teeth on my neck, so I was dead; physics would just take another couple of seconds to catch up. You can’t morph out of a leopard throat bite. I barely had time to notice its big leopard paws on my shoulders and Karen, my bundle of clothes and I went sprawling along the ground and those teeth began to pinch.

And were dragged away. I felt the teeth slice through my neck, but they were being pulled back, scoring deep cuts in my flesh. I was used to battle wounds, used to doing the calculations in real time; _spine intact, airways clear, arteries whole, not immediately fatal_ ; _deal with the threat and retreat to morph and heal_. I rolled, twisting my head to locate the teammate who had saved me and see if they needed backup. A hork-bajir dragged the leopard away and smacked it with an arm blade. The weakened, injured beast ran off. I checked the horns: three, male morph. Rachel.

“Leave, cat!” the hork-bajir growled. A very small hork-bajir, apparently riding on his back, lifted her head into view.

Not Rachel. Actual, real-life Jara Hamee.

“Jara?” I asked quietly.

“Cassie will live?” he asked with concern.

“Cassie will live,” I agreed. I sat up and rubbed at my neck. There was an awful lot of blood, but with the artery intact, I shouldn’t bleed out. Ket dropped from the tree behind Karen and me.

<Huzzah, Robinson Crusoe is rescued,> said Marco’s mental voice. I caught sight of his osprey morph alighting on a nearby branch. <Now let’s kill the Controller and get out of here before soldiers start showing up.>

“No!” I protested, throwing myself over Karen before Ket could strike. I glared up at her. “She’s just a kid! What are you doing?”

Ket blinked at me. “Free or dead,” she said, sounding vaguely puzzled. But she let me pull Karen to her feet. Karen seemed paralysed, eyes flicking between the hork-bajir that had been about to kill her and the one identical to the form that had killed her brother. I pulled her several steps away and tried not to think about how quickly a hork-bajir could close that distance.

<Cassie?> Marco asked. <What the hell are you doing?>

“You can’t kill her,” I said, as if that was some kind of explanation. “You can’t.”

<What are you going to do with her? You can’t starve the yeerk out out here, this place is crawling with Controllers. And she knows way too much. I heard enough of your conversation to know that.>

“She doesn’t know who you are!”

<Does she know who you are?>

I had nothing to say to that.

To his credit, Marco was clearly trying to hide his exasperation. It didn’t work. <Cassie. I know you’re going through some stressful stuff right now. But this is life and death. We’ve had to kill a lot of Controllers to protect humanity, and this is no different. So can you just promise me one thing? Can you promise me you’ll hold off on freaking out until we’re out of this forest?>

I looked at Karen. She was still staring at Ket and Jara. Or Aftran was staring at Ket and Jara. Little Toby was watching everything from her father’s shoulder. So young, the first hork-bajir born into freedom, and we were making her witness this. One of her first experiences with the world would be witnessing a murder. Strange that I’d feel guilty now, after perverting her father’s blades with the blood of so many. Maybe Aftran was right; maybe I only cared because Karen and Toby were young and innocent-looking and cute. I tried not to think about the blood of Aftran’s brother’s host on my blades, the hork-bajir I might have murdered. Had I killed him before the retreat order, or after?

<Cassie,> Marco said, his voice stable, soothing. <Go off into the trees and let us take care of this.> He sounded so self-assured, like he knew he would be obeyed. He had everything in hand, all the pieces lined up. He didn’t sound like Marco usually sounded at all, all borderline hysteria and uncertainty barely concealed with a thin veneer of wit. He sounded self-assured enough that I’d already turned and took two steps into the trees before I realised why it was familiar.

He sounded like Jake. Marco was imitating Jake. He needed something terrible done, so he was giving an order, and after facing death so many times and being saved only by a unified team I’d turned right around on his command.

I almost laughed out loud. The question wasn’t _Did I murder Aftran’s brother? Did I strike before or after the retreat command?_

The question was, _Why do I think that matters? Did he need to die or not? Is it somehow less of a sin if I kill on an order than my own volition? Is it okay to kill on Jake’s order, but not okay to kill Aftran in the forest?_

_Is it okay if I let Marco do this, here and now? Would that make it somehow less bad, just because it would spare some of my precious feelings?_

“I’ll do it,” I told Marco. “It’s okay. This is my responsibility.”

I spun back to face the girl, the frightened little girl. Karen, who I hadn’t had a chance to get to know at all, whose head was now on the chopping block. Aftran, who… well, we weren’t friends, it’s hard to be friends if your entire relationship is based on trying to enslave or kill each other, but I felt like in different circumstances, we could have been.

Two people who I had to kill. Wrong place, wrong time. They knew too much and the path I’d chosen, the path of blood and violence and fear in the name of protection, gave one clear, obvious option. The world we lived in, the war we fought, said that those girls had to die.

That wasn’t a world I was prepared to live in. That wasn’t a war I was willing to fight.

There was still the dracon beam in my trouser pocket. My trousers were still splayed out on the forest floor. I didn’t let myself look at them. I looked only at Karen. Her eyes met mine, finally moving away from the hork-bajir.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You both deserve better than this. But this is war.” There were tears in Karen’s eyes. I swallowed and continued. “I can’t afford to be short-sighted, you know. No matter what looks like a good idea in the moment… we’re fighting a long war here. It’s important to win the war, even if I lose this battle. Even if I lose every battle. I guess you don’t have to win battles to win the war.” My back was to the hork-bajir and to Marco, so when Karen’s eyes widened a little in recognition of my words, I could glance to one side to indicate Marco without him being able to see anything. I pressed on before Aftran could become confused enough to make the others suspicious.

“The yeerks came to our planet,” I said, stepping forward, taking her hands. “We have to make a play. And all we can do… is play tit for tat. I’m sorry. It’s… it’s time to say goodbye, Karen.” I pulled the girl into a hug, wrapped my arms around her, squeezed her tight.

The advantage of being on a team with someone like Marco is that Marco is not stupid. And despite occasional teasing, he seems to hold the opinion that I am not stupid either. This is a huge advantage if I need to do something incredibly, mind-blowingly moronic without him realising. I knew that it wouldn’t even occur to him that my sympathetic, bleeding heart goodbye hug was anything but a small emotional outburst, a safe thing to do with a little girl under the watch of a pair of bladed warriors. He wouldn’t even realise that in our embrace, my ear was pressed to Karen’s. It wouldn’t occur to him to wonder how long it would take a yeerk to exit one ear and crawl into another. He wouldn’t consider the possibility that I was staying still, my hand on the back of Karen’s head holding her ear steady against mine, while something gooey and alive squirted some kind of numbing solution on my eardrum and then pushed its way past.

It was a very strange sort of sensation. It was a bit like morphing in that I could feel the yeerk pressing through where nothing was supposed to move, but there was none of the expected pain. It felt huge as it wormed its way past my eardrum, but I knew it couldn’t be, because Controllers weren’t all deaf. I felt a strange tingle, a… a weakness, I guess, flowing through my body, and it took a moment for me to realise what it was – my muscles weren’t responding to me any more. They felt normal in that I could feel where they were, feel the tension in them, but if I tried to move… nothing. It started in my neck and head and moved out over my body, muscle group by muscle group. My left arm didn’t respond to me, then my right. Soon I wasn’t controlling my breathing, my balance, my eye focus. A feeling of total powerlessness beyond anything I’d ever felt before. A little bit fascinating. A lot more frightening.

Karen, of course, immediately burst out crying. “I want my mummy!” she wailed, collapsing into my shoulder with great, heaving sobs. My hand lifted and brushed her ear, wiping away a thing trail of slime before anybody could see, and then my arms pushed her to the ground.

“That won’t help,” my mouth said, the sound pushing from my vocal cords and around my tongue with no input whatsoever from me. “I know what you are.” My hands reached up to the sides of my head as if to grip at my hair in frustration, but I felt my palm rub across my own ear, wiping away slime. And then I felt…

It was a little bit like the Ellimist, when he spoke into my mind. The thoughts, the ideas, seemed to originate in my own brain, and it took me a moment to realise the difference – these were mine, all mine. My own memories being pulled up, moved through before they could register properly. The feeling of climbing a tree, the smell of Dad’s chilli, how my heart lurched the last time Mum had yelled at me… barely recogniseable in the moments that they were drawn up and discarded, completely outside my control. I usually don’t consider myself to have very good mental control at the best of times, what with all the screaming nightmares and unbidden thoughts, but compared to the feeling of a yeerk rifling through your head, every human is a mental control master. Aftran didn’t have control of my thoughts; there would be no such thing as host rebellion if she did. I could think, although I knew already that my thoughts could be read in real time. I could remember things on my own, although I couldn’t prevent her from pulling them up herself. Right then, Aftran was looking for one specific thing, and in the second or two it took to push Karen away and step back, she’d found it.

She had remembered how to morph. She had remembered my wolf form, slinking through the forest, through buildings, through tunnels, leaping and tearing at throats. She focused. I felt myself change.

<No!> I screamed in my own brain. <No, don’t kill her! She’s a little girl! Just a helpless, innocent little girl!>

<Aren’t we all?> Aftran asked, speaking mentally to me for the first time. I was relieved to find that it felt quite a lot like andalite thought-speak. I could handle thought-speak. I was worried she’d sound too much like my own thoughts, that I’d have to parse her voice from mine, never sure who was thinking what. That would be even more of a nightmare than losing control of my own body.

As I shrank, as fur and teeth grew, Aftran delved through my mind again, searching for the answer to another question: who were all these people? I watched the memories unfold as she jumped from one to the other, going for speed rather than completeness, building a fractured network of information. Jara, my hork-bajir DNA source; my acquiring him while running from the yeerks; the faked death scene for him and Ket; Jara and Ket swearing friendship in the hork-bajir valley; meeting Toby… Marco shielding me in battle; Marco throwing in a ‘Xena, Warrior Princess’ joke when it looked like Rachel might remain silent about a dangerous mission; The force behind Ket and Jara’s words as they chanted ‘free or dead!’; Marco telling a bad joke just as Animorphs started to round on each other and drawing the tension on himself. The curiously intent way in which Toby watched me, watched everything, absorbing the world around her moment by moment. Marco talking about our roles in the group after the whole hammerhead shark thing, trying to convince me that the team dynamic had been off and it was somehow his fault.

Aftran had just started to pull up memories of the other Animorphs when Karen got to her feet and tried to run. In an instant, Ket was there, pinning her to the ground.

<Ket, no!> Aftran called in my mental voice. <There is enough blood on your hands. It’s my responsibility.>

I fell forward onto my four paws. A tail shot from my spine.

<No,> I pleaded in my own head. <Don’t do it. Don’t hurt her. You can’t hurt her. Please.>

Aftran bared my teeth. Waved my tail.

Turned and dashed off into the undergrowth.

Jara could have stopped me, could have cut me down, but he hesitated, let me pass. They would figure out what had happened very, very quickly. But a hork-bajir, while it might keep pace with a wolf in the short term, would tire much more quickly. And an osprey, while it could keep up, didn’t have the firepower to take a wolf down.

<Why?> Aftran asked me as we got out of there.

<I made you a promise,> I told her. <You die in me. That was the agreement. They’ll want to tie me up, to starve you out. More likely they’ll be forced to kill me. Either way, we had a deal. I could save Karen, but I can’t save you. I can only do this for you.> Noble speeches aside, it was starting to occur to me how ridiculously selfish my actions were. Not because they put the Animorphs at risk – I had no doubt in their ability to capture us before we found a yeerk patrol, and even if they couldn’t, any patrol was easily their equal and we’d never make it to the Pool – but because of what I was making them do. I had wanted them to understand, I had wanted them to remember that lives were valuable. We always backed off when Tom was at risk, as if he was more valuable than anybody else just because he was Jake’s brother; I needed them to remember that it wasn’t just Tom, that Controllers were real people and that killing them put real blood on our hands. I didn’t think I could make any of them care about yeerks, but they acknowledged hosts, at least. Marco was ready to kill Karen without hesitation. He’d at least _try_ to save me. Try like we should try for everyone.

But he wouldn’t be able to, not with so many Controllers about. The Animorphs would almost certainly be forced to kill me. And maybe they would be more cautious in the future, maybe the blood of a friend on their teeth would remind them of the value of life, maybe it would save even more lives in the future beyond Karen’s. Maybe.

What it would definitely do is stain their souls forever, give them another thing to wake up screaming about. If Marco came for me without going for Jake, Jake and Rachel – maybe all the Animorphs – would never forgive him. If he went for Jake, Jake would have to give the order. Because I couldn’t do it. Because I couldn’t fight the war. Aftran would die either way, and because I couldn’t kill somebody I’d never even had a conversation with, at least one Animorph would spend the rest of their life with Animorph blood on their conscience.

And I suspected that Marco wouldn’t go for Jake. He’d come after me himself, and he’d kill me so that Jake never had to give the order. So that Rachel never had a chance to stop it that she could mull over and regret forever. So that Tobias didn’t have to be complicit, so that Ax didn’t have to watch his linguistic protégé die an enemy slave. He’d take their anger. He’d let them call him evil. He’d gleefully blow a chasm between himself and the rest of the group to act as a barrier between them and the necessities of war. No, not necessities. My choices.

But I had saved Karen. Was it worth it?

<I could have killed her,> Aftran pointed out. <I could have killed the ‘Controller’, pretended to be you, and walked right on home to the yeerks without worrying about being chased.>

<You wouldn’t have done that,> I said. <You wouldn’t have killed her.>

<You didn’t seem so sure when we were morphing.>

<I was… somewhat worried that I had misjudged. But apparently not.>

<So that’s the plan, then? Karen goes into hiding and the rest of us all go to hell together?>

<I guess that’s it, yeah.> There was no point in pretending to the mind reader that my actions had any basis in sound logical principles. The ‘tit for tat’ rhetoric held in most situations, but I hadn’t exactly stopped to do a cost/benefit analysis, and we definitely weren’t dealing with a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation. It was quite probable that what I’d just done was really, really stupid. It was very likely that what I’d just done was really, really stupid.

I’d definitely done something really, really stupid. I don’t tend to think of myself as stubborn, but when you do something like throw your life away and prepare to seriously traumatise your friends and sabotage your own freedom fighting force out of sheer anger at the universe for just existing in the way it does, it’s time for a personality re-evaluation.

We kept up a good pace, weaving through the underbrush and occasionally reversing direction. Somewhere above would be Marco, trying to predict where we were going so he could ambush us in gorilla morph. Behind us, I could hear hork-bajir moving through the trees. Not along the ground like hork-bajir Controllers, but up high in the branches. Ket, or Jara, or both. I had no idea whether they’d be able to see me or not. I’d been a hork-bajir often enough to have a really good idea of their colour range, but there’s a lot of variation in vision. Leerans could see the edges of things that should be invisible, but colour was almost irrelevant to them. Flies could detect movement and direction instantly but had trouble with the concept of visual shapes. Osprey vision could look through water glare like it wasn’t even there, and flew under an ultraviolet sky invisible to humans. Whether any kind of camouflage worked on something it wasn’t designed to hide from was pretty hit-and-miss. And wolf camouflage was mediocre at best.

Aftran poked through my memories at a more leisurely pace as we travelled. She zeroed in on my becoming an Animorph pretty quickly, which made sense; it was a fairly definitive point in my life. The Cassie from before that day didn’t even feel like me any more; she felt like somebody I knew briefly as a kid. Her memories were like some movie I watched once, a movie with a plot and characterisation that I couldn’t really get into.

Aftran watched Elfangor stumble out of the ship, watched him tell us of the war, of the yeerks. I could feel her anger at his tone, and I wasn’t sure if that was unintentional or if she wanted me to feel it. I supposed that we’d be dead before I had a chance to figure out most things about being a Controller.

She watched him enlist us, watched him promise that his people would come back, but not fast enough. She watched Visser Three land. Heard the memory of Elfangor screaming, dying, in my head.

<So his triumph over the Beast Elfangor is true, then,> she noted as the memory of my own helpless sobs played in my head and my body dodged around a tree, outside my control. <I thought it might be war propaganda.>

<It was murder,> I pointed out. <It was no triumph. Just pure, sadistic murder.>

<It was war,> she said. <We’re outrunning a genocidal force, trying to settle faster than they can wipe us out, trying to survive. Do you have any idea how many yeerks Elfangor had killed?>

<It doesn’t matter. He was helpless.>

<And your blade in my brother’s throat, was that murder?>

<Yes. Yes it was.>

<I am surprised that you humans even have a concept of murder.>

<We’re not all warlike brutes!> I protested. I considered that. <I mean, we’re not warlike brutes all the time. Evolution has left us with… biases.>

<I am beginning to think that might be universal,> Aftran sighed. It sounded like an admission, but I wasn’t sure what she was trying to admit. Aftran watched our plan to infiltrate Chapman’s house. Watched Chapman plead for his daughter’s freedom. She watched us try to hijack a supply ship, watched us rescue Ax; mission after mission, battle after battle, nightmare after nightmare.

<You know,> she noted, <to the Empire, at least the part of it on Earth, you’re like some kind of bogeyman. Visser Three insists you’re a minor nuisance but everyone’s always like ‘watch out or the Andalite Bandits will get you; pay attention on guard duty or the Andalite Bandits will get you; keep trained on weapons or the Andalite Bandits will get you.’ But it seems like you guys spend most of your time just trying to stay alive.>

<And getting people killed in the process,> I agreed. <See why I wanted to run away?>

<You’re lucky,> she said. <We don’t get that option. We’re here, and we deal with it. There’s nowhere to run. We need the Pool or we starve.> I could see the Yeerk Pool as she spoke, and I was pretty sure this time that she was showing me on purpose. I saw it as a yeerk must see it; or, more accurately, I felt it, since yeerks don’t see. It was home, comforting, safe; but safe in the way that a jail cell is safe. It was almost totally silent, the only sound the occasional edge of an ultrasonic squeak that the memory told me was a yeerk form of echolocation, caught from a nearby yeerk trying to navigate. There was very little interaction; the yeerks were there to eat. I could feel Aftran’s uncomfortable boredom as she absorbed Kandrona rays and waited to return to her host.

<Wait a minute,> I said, <I thought you guys were a really social species? You’ve been going on for the past two days about how non-social humans are. You don’t talk? You don’t interact?>

<The Pool is for eating,> Aftran pointed out. <We socialise abovepool, in our hosts.>

<So you don’t have some kind of natural method of communication?>

<Yes, for children, and for yeerks who can’t find a host if they _must_ interrupt people. But it’s not polite to interrupt people while they’re eating. >

<That’s all you do in the Pool? Just eat? You don’t have… I don’t know, the yeerk equivalent of books or games or anything? Art?>

<Of course we have _art_ ,> Aftran retorted, showing me a memory of her in Karen’s body doing some kind of art project at school. It looked like a normal child’s painting of a house, but embedded in the memory was the knowledge that the lines on the brickwork indicated the ridge patterns on the heads of some of her yeerk friends. A secret, yeerk-only bonus. I could feel her pride at her cleverness, making her seem very much like a little girl.

Karen’s thoughts and emotions, I noticed, had not been included in the shared memory.

<I don’t mean, can you produce _our_ art. Write pop songs or do painting or have hork-bajir dance rituals or whatever. You’re blind, why would paintings matter? Don’t you have… yeerk songs? Or, or chemical art? Smell-based art? Dancing? You have a mating dance; do you have other dances? >

<That,> Aftran said in the slow, stable voice of somebody talking to a small and confused child, <is what host are for. As I said.>

I thought about that. It occurred to me that like Aftran’s perspective had shown me things I’d never considered about my people, perhaps she was blind to things that I could see, too. I phrased my response with care, although I needn’t have bothered, since she could read my mind.

<Don’t you think that’s a little weird?> I asked cautiously. <I mean, you’re a social species. You had to have some kind of art or entertainment before you had hosts.>

<We had gedd,> she said tersely. <We’ve always had gedd.>

<Right. Okay. But think about it. There weren’t enough gedd, were there? Or else you wouldn’t all be out here without hosts.>

<You can’t know that.>

<Do you? Do you know what it was like when there was only yeerks and gedd?>

<Our history is none of your business,> she snapped, which I took to mean ‘no’.

<Okay, fine, but just think about it. You take hosts for three days, right? Three days or you starve. And then you have to go back to the Pool, which is cold and silent and boring, and then you do it all again.>

<We have to,> she said. <Do you understand, now? Do you understand what it’s like, being in that Pool, without a host?> She shared something else, a memory so skewed and blurred by emotion that it took me a moment to realise what was happening. Aftran, a very young Aftran, in the Pool. Not the same Pool from before, not the Pool on Earth, but a shallow one with metal sides; the Pool ship Katt Dialma. There were some kind of primitive communication device on one side (primitive to the yeerks, not to me) that allowed yeerks in the Pool to have a halting, crude conversation with hosted yeerks, but there was otherwise very little. Aftran crawled into an ear, a strangely shaped ear that I knew to belong to the training gedd, the gedd used to familiarise young yeerks with the process of taking a host. It was the last step in reaching adulthood. There were several health problems that could kill a young yeerk or leave it severely disabled even after hatching, and the last major one to present itself was an inability to interface with brain tissue. If the young yeerks could control the gedd, it would mean that their _kandhan_ was not corrupted. It would mean that they were whole, proper yeerks.

Aftran crawled in. She made the connections. And suddenly…

It was like the difference between being told that the sun was 1.3 billion times the size of the Earth, and actually being able to feel in your bones what the number 1.3 billion really meant. It was more than the new senses that opened up to me in new morphs, more even than discovering Leeran telepathy; it was like the concept of space bigger than a hole in the ground suddenly came into existence, the concept of humidity existed as more than the dangerous threat of drying out, and the body was huge and it was strange and it was mine, by which I mean it was Aftran’s, and the mind, a whole new _mind_ …

The memory cut off, leaving me feeling a bit hollow. Yes, I understood. But it still didn’t make sense. If the yeerks had such a love of sense and space and communication, why swim silently in their Pools and dream of us? Why did they simultaneously look down on us and glorify our senses and abilities? On the one hand, hosts were nothing; on the other hand, a yeerk was nothing without a host. On the one hand, we were sad, miserable creatures; on the other hand, our lives and bodies and experiences were worth a war. The whole thing was like a method lesson in cognitive dissonance. Assuming that was a thing for yeerks. I had no real basis for understanding how yeerks thought.

I got back to the point I was making. <Right, right. Three days in a head, feeding time in a Pool. But that means you’re pushing yourself to near-starvation every three days, doesn’t it? Isn’t that uncomfortable?>

<It’s better than not having a host,> she replied.

<Okay, but what if the choice isn’t ‘live blind in a sensorially barren pit’ or ‘work yourself to the brink of death over and over for life’? You could have a society where you share hosts, say, do shifts of two days, and then swap with someone else for two days. You wouldn’t even need cages or cafeterias or any of that stuff, because the hosts would be in and out. You could talk to each other in the Pool, do whatever yeerks do for fun. I don’t believe that you guys naturally hate your own natural environment so much and love ours. It doesn’t make sense.>

<You don’t know what you’re talking about,> Aftran snapped. <This is a war. We have to push, we have to be ready all the time. We don’t have time for games and things.>

<Why not?> I asked. <You have a shortage of hosts, right? That’s the problem, yes? So why do some yeerks work themselves to death while others never get out of the Pool? Why does nobody ever say ‘hey, maybe you should do a day and then I’ll do a day, since there’s not enough hosts for us both anyway, and meanwhile whoever’s in the Pool can relax’?>

<Because that sort of laziness is a great way to lose your host,> Aftran replied. <We can’t afford slackers out in the world. The hosts are too limited. One good worker is worth two selfish and lazy yeerks easily.>

<Ah.> A picture was beginning to form in my mind, a picture that made all too much sense. A picture of artificial desperation that rebranded morality as betrayal and efficiency as laziness and convinced people to blindly throw their whole lives into serving the system because it told them it was the only way. I didn’t voice my thoughts, but I didn’t have to. Aftran could read them as easily as I could.

<You know nothing about my Pool, or my people,> she growled in my mind. <How could you possibly understand? You were born into this world, you chose to get involved in this war and then acted like somebody else did it to you. You’re just a stupid little girl.>

<Smart enough to see through your society, it seems.>

<Smart? You call anything you do _smart_? > She started drawing up old memories, shameful memories, memories targeted to humiliate me. I wasn’t sure what she was hoping to achieve, unless she thought she could somehow shame me into not thinking any more. She pulled up the time I wet the bed when I was rather too old to be wetting the bed, the time a boy had asked me out on a date as a cruel joke and I’d cried in front of everyone, the time Jake had brushed a hand against my chest by complete accident and I’d spent an entire week thinking about it. I was sort of perversely proud of how many of the memories of stupid mistakes and petty human fantasies didn’t involve getting anyone maimed or killed, although many of them still did. It kind of made me feel like I still existed outside the war. Some of them even happened after I met Elfangor. Small victories, I supposed.

But of course, no sooner did I have the thought than she focused exclusively on war memories, digging herself right into my guilt and discomfort with killing and staying there. She wandered back and forth in time, pulling them up essentially at random. The first hork-bajir I’d made the conscious decision to kill. Her brother, my knife slicing through his hork-bajir’s throat. Flying my broken little bat body over to Erek with the Pemalite Crystal in my claws, allowing him – forcing him – to do harm to save us. Contaminating the Pool with oatmeal and condemning the yeerks within; drugging the school lunches with oatmeal to slowly poison the Controllers there. Blowing up the entire Continent on Leera, the fear and pain and confusion of the Controllers there pouring into my Leeran brain. Killing a termite queen, that one little insect, and breaking down, screaming, forcing Rachel to hold me down and keep me silent while Ax continued with our mission.

Aftran laughed and laughed at that, confused disbelief mixed with amusement bubbling into my mind. My tangled mental knot of guilt and shame included the memories of destroying an entire continent of sentient beings that screamed their despair into my very mind, and killing an insect. I’d killed thousands of insects. I killed insects all the time.

<That’s just stupid,> Aftran sneered. <What kind of sense does that make?>

I was getting kind of annoyed at the Cassie-bullying party, so I told her. I didn’t bother with words or even ordered thoughts. I pulled up the whole tangled mess of right and wrong and good and bad and everything I’d tried to muddle out on paper or cried about at night or half-asked my Dad without giving too much away, and I shoved it all right at her.

Silence.

It wasn’t until the biology facts started flooding through my mind that I realised she might not have the same life knowledge as me. She might not know how things worked in the same way I did. She might not have the background to understand the same perspective. Aftran consumed my knowledge with the speed and efficiency of one both born and trained to do it. I caught flashes of her emotion here and there, which I supposed was her attempt to keep in communication, but she didn’t bother to provide any context. It was sort of like talking to that one person who always says something completely random and then seems surprised that you haven’t been following their private train of thought for the last five minutes. I felt the awe and wonder that anybody feels when they learn something that changes their perspective on the universe. I felt those feelings spike occasionally, although she was moving too fast for me to follow what specifically amazed her, and I knew that if I were human and in control of my own body then the reflected emotion would have driven me to tears. It reminded me of the time I sat kneeling on the ground outside at midnight as a child, gripping at the grass and sobbing, when I first tried to properly conceive of the vastness of the distance between stars. It reminded me of the memory Aftran had shown me of finding a life outside the Pool for the first time, a larger body, sight and a sense of true _space_.

There was no telling if she stumbled at the same facts that I did. Aftran might not care that a mushroom is more closely related to a human than it is to a flower, or that humans and rats are exactly as evolutionary distant to each other as tree shrews and rats, or that Cleopatra lived closer to the time of the first moon landing than the time the Great Pyramid was built, or that if you had a theoretically infinitely long piece of paper you only needed to fold it 32 times for the folded stack of paper to reach past the moon. Maybe yeerks found different facts astounding. But she found _something_ in my mind astounding.

I watched her build the world as I knew it, from the ground up. Molecules were the meaningful relationships between atoms. Rocks and water and DNA and cell membranes were the meaningful realationship between molecules. Cells were a meaningful relationship between DNA and membranes and organelles, tiny little factories where parts produced copies of themselves. Big organisms like us were the meaningful relationships between cells, and so were microbial mats and grassy plains and even the plaque on our teeth. Minds were in the meaningful relationships between certain kinds of cells. Nerve cells for us. Something else for yeerks, apparently. Communities, societies, and advanced ideas like money and politics and religion were in the meaningful relationships between minds. And the meaningful relationships between those things affected the world on a massive scale, for decades or centuries at a time.

You found meaning where you looked. The universe teemed with too much activity not to. We were biologically inclined to think of ourselves as a thing, an individual, but it was equally accurate to think of a society as an individual, us as the components much like the cells in our bodies, with political brains and law-enforcing immune systems and money as a kind of token of energy transfer flowing through society like sugar and oxygen in our own blood. You could think of our cells as individuals, as a person as a nation with much more cohesion than any human nation simply because so many of the participants had a single germ line, our eggs or sperm, to depend upon. To do that, you had to take into account the bacteria, too, that formed much of our bodies, that spoke a different chemical language to our own cells and had a different way of doing things but that still, on the whole, managed to cooperate toward the same goal.

You could go a level deeper and think on the level of an evolutionary biologist, move living things out of the spotlight and focus instead on inheritance patterns; that is, on the movement of DNA, building their great lumbering machines that we called ‘organisms’ as a mere tool for creating more copies of their own genes. You could go a level higher, like a sociologist or an economist, and view those great lumbering machines instead as a vehicle for thoughts or ideas or the movement of resources of different value. On every level was animation, was _life_. Even that which was too simple or too complex to be properly defined as alive.

Where was the line between a termite and a human? Between a human and an ellimist? Between a human and a chee, a chee and a calculator? To Aftran’s credit, she didn’t freak out like humans usually did when somebody took away the lines between different kinds of things. I’d grown up in a scientifically literate society where most people saw through the lines at a pretty early age, before they really had any societal power to do much about it, but I knew enough history to know that that hadn’t always been the case. Humans had invented entire genres of horror fiction and started major religious wars in the past over taking the lines away. Then they’d put them back in a slightly different place, say they’d found The Truth this time, and when the next generation found them to be wrong they would freak out all over again. But Aftran seemed calm. Maybe yeerks didn’t need the lines like humans did.

It occurred to me that my assumption that I lived in a society that had found The Truth and erased all the unnecessary lines was probably exactly what all the other generations thought. But before I could muse on that properly, Aftran spoke.

<It’s _kandhan_ ,> she whispered in my mind. <The whole thing, the whole world. It’s not yeerk, it’s not the same in substance, but in pattern, it… it’s like _kandhan_. By the Kandrona, it’s exactly like _kandhan_. It’s a swirling morass of DNA, dancing with each other, settling and jumping between bodies! And ever-changing story told in the progress of life itself! >

<You didn’t know?> I asked. <You didn’t know what biology was? What evolution meant?>

<I’d heard the phrases,> she said. <Survival of the Fittest and change over time and stuff, all those pithy little things that you humans say. But not this. Not this dance.>

<You see what I meant about game theory now, don’t you?> I asked.

<Yes. Sort of. I see… oh. I see.>

<You see what?> I asked.

She told me.

It’s hard to describe what she showed me right then. I’m not sure I remember it all accurately, or even that I saw it all accurately. I probably interpreted it badly. In the same way I showed her my world and she put it in the framework of her _kandhan_ and _ravhan_ , she showed me her world and I put it in the framework of evolution, in the patterns of information and how I perceived their flow. So I can’t accurately describe what she showed me. I’m not sure I’m even capable of understanding what she showed me. I can only describe what I saw.

I saw two worlds, or two… energies, I suppose, moving over each other. _Kandhan_ and _ravhan_ , body and mind; two sources of identity that united in a complementary fashion to create a yeerk. The individual was in the unity, the marriage between the two forces, but living was in their motion and mutation and transfer. _Kandhan_ , that could change with each generation, fragments uniting and swirling and breaking part into new combinations. Barely changeable, at least for one generation; either good or bad, weak or strong, but dependable. And _ravhan_ , that stirred and swirled and moved back and forth like… well, like lightning. Changeable, adaptable, powerful, but difficult to control. _Ravhan_ changed not only by moving back and forth between bodies, but it collected and mutated through sheer exposure to the world, through experience and thought as well as communication. In the union of the two was a yeerk, a union as strong and yet as temporary as the union of a yeerk and a host to make a Controller. The changeability of _ravhan_ meant that the yeerk you spoke to one day might not be the same yeerk the next, even if they shared the same name and body. It changed. People changed. The Pool was, usually, fairly stable, although of course that too changed over time. But more predictably. The Pool was where the thoughts and feelings and physical characteristics of a yeerk that didn’t belong to that specific yeerk at that time waited, in the form of poolmates.

And it wasn’t until that moment that I understood what it meant for a yeerk to be a Controller. Why it was so important, important enough to enslave and kill over. Yeerks created children by combining together and merging their _kandhan_ for a new generation, and they had “children” by passing on their _ravhan_ ; cultivating ideas, communicating them, teaching skills. It was a drive as fundamental as the human’s drive to have sex or care for babies. But in the blank, silent, businesslike Pools, communication was limited and stimulation moreso. One could think, certainly. One could mull over ideas and develop and change them. But for a yeerk’s _ravhan_ to truly thrive, they needed a host. They needed to speak with other yeerks, they needed to see or feel or taste or do _something_ new and stimulating. I could see how a yeerk, once exposed, would never want to give a host up. It would be like asking me to give up all sugar, forever.

And I could see what my knowledge had helped her to understand. In Aftran’s view, _kandhan_ was slow, and predictable, and unadaptable; _ravhan_ was fast and mutable and dynamic. This was because, like everyone, Aftran’s natural scope for viewing things was a lifetime. A yeerk who didn’t reproduce might see a few generations come and go, and over that length of time, change in life is slow and predictable, and change in ideas is fast. I don’t think she really understood that the only difference was one of scale. In the same way that one can’t predict the success of Tit For Tat by looking at one or two rounds of Prisoner’s Dilemma, one can’t see evolution by looking at a few generations. The pattern was beautiful. The pattern was worth preserving.

The pattern was _identical_.

Only the form was different. Yeerks evolved in the same way we did. Their inheritance patterns might look a bit different, based on three sources instead of two, but the principles were the same. Yeerks thought the same as we did. Their perspectives might be different, but the principles were the same.

<Do you know why we go for sentient races?> Aftran asked me. <Why we don’t build ourselves robots or infest other animals or something?>

<I… had wondered.>

<I hadn’t. Not until now. We’re not supposed to think these things. We’re not supposed to contaminate the Pool with these thoughts. But I think it’s the _ravhan_. The s[ecies doesn’t matter, only the information matters. The fact that you think inside nerves instead of the way we do it doesn’t matter. If it did, if hosts were like computers, why wouldn’t we just use actual computers? It’s because we want to unite _ravhan_ to _ravhan_. Like this. It has to be. >

<You’re lonely,> I said, translating her comment into ‘human-speak’. <You can’t bear to be on your own. That’s why you have to take people.>

<Yes.>

<It’s wrong to enslave people.>

<Yes. It is.>

We had stopped moving, I noticed. The sounds of hork-bajir pursuit had died away as well. Oh, right. We were running for our lives.

I had actually managed to forget that we were running for our lives. I guess it’s hard to stay focused on a situation when you have absolutely no control over anything. How did other hosts do it? Was this normal?

How long had we even been moving? One minute? Ten minutes? An hour? I counted out my breaths, tried to get some sense of time back. Not even my breathing was under my own control. We’d made several turns to confuse Marco, so we’d been running for a while… and knowing where the yeerk forces were, knowing how fast a wolf moved…

<Aftran?> I asked, suspicion creeping into my mental voice. <Shouldn’t we have reached some yeerk forces by now?>

She didn’t respond.

<You’re not turning us in,> I said. A statement, not a question. <Where are you taking us?>

<I have to take us to the Empire,> she answered. <I have to. There are only hours left before the fugue begins. We’ll have you, your friends, your family; a fitting result, after you killed my family. I’ll live, and probably get a sizeable promotion.>

<And yet we don’t seem to be moving toward any yeerk forces.>

<You spared Karen. You would have spared me, if there was any possible way to do it. I didn’t believe that until I could see into your mind, but it’s true. You took this absurd risk to spare my host and so that I could die with you. But I don’t have a way to save you. I’m sorry.>

<I understand.> I did. It was hard to resent her for making essentially the same choice that I’d made almost three days before, deciding to make sure that she starved.

Still, we didn’t move.

<What am I supposed to do, Cassie?>

<Run away with me,> I said suddenly. I surprised us both, I think. I started to explain before she could do something disconcerting like poke around my mind for my meaning. <When Jake had a yeerk in his head, it… he, Temrash… morphed an ant. That’s way too small for a yeerk to fit. I think your mind goes with ours, to zero-space, and… and I can’t be sure, but I don’t think getting hungry applies in zero-space. It can’t, all we are out there is a messy bag of flesh. All we need to do is stay in morph for two hours. Two hours, and you can live. The Animorphs will let us go; they don’t want to kill me, and if you’re not a yeerk any more, they’ll give us a chance. We can run off to the mountains. You won’t need the Pool any more.>

<There’s a difference between needing the Pool and _needing the Pool_ ,> she told me solemnly as my bones shifted and my hair disappeared. Demorphing, Aftran was demorphing. Why? Were we near the time limit already? <What is with this strange fetish that humans seem to have for sacrificing themselves?>

<We do not! We’re just willing to do whatever it takes – >

<‘Whatever it takes’? It’s like your plan B is always ‘die’. I’ve seen your memories. Captured at the yeerk pool? Better find a way to kill myself! Oh, look, rescue. On the Blade ship? Let’s make a suicide pact! Oh, I guess we’d better fight for our deaths… whoops, we survived. Little girl in trouble? I know, I’ll take her yeerk into my head and _force my friends to kill me_. >

<That’s out of context,> I said. <Sometimes it’s the only way.>

<The only way? Really? After you killed my brother, you felt so bad about it that you invented a way to sacrifice yourself out of nothing! You humans are obsessed with sacrificing yourselves. It’s like you can’t stop trying to do it. It’s like you always have to take the easy way out.>

<Sacrifice isn’t easy. It’s hard. That’s why it’s sacrifice. Selfishness is easy.>

Aftran pressed my now-human body against the trunk of a tree, glancing at the canopy above. Was Marco still up there? Could he still see us? She took a deep, steadying breath.

<Sacrifice isn’t the opposite of selfishness,> she said. <Compassion is. People selfishly sacrifice all the time. It’s like there’s something in you that thinks that throwing life or energy or resources at something can save you the effort of having to make decisions, like your time is some kind of currency that can make up for flaws in your personality. ‘If I volunteer at this soup kitchen, it makes up for me being a terrible person! If I throw my life away against this enemy, it proves that I’m not a coward!’ You have whole genres of fiction where the hero proves they’re a hero by needlessly giving their life for something stupid. What, do you think running off to the forest to save me from starving is some noble thing that will absolve your sins?>

<It’ll save you,> I said.

<It won’t. Because I can’t run away. I won’t run away.>

<Then one of us will lose.>

<Do you think that heading off into the forest alone is any less of a loss?>

<So what are you going to do, then? Walk up to one of the search parties and turn us all in? You know you don’t want to do that. You know it’s wrong. If you didn’t we’d be there already.>

<It’s fight or die! Isn’t that what you keep telling yourself when you butcher us?>

<It’s wrong. You know it’s wrong. This slavery and death and everything. You know what they’ll do to me and my friends and family. You know what Visser Three is like.>

Her breath – my breath – caught at that. <They’re my Pool,> she said. <I can’t run. I’m not like you. I have to fight.>

<Even when it’s wrong.>

<There is no right here! I’m a yeerk! You can’t ask me not to _be_ a yeerk! >

<You have free will,> I pointed out. <You have your own… _ravhan_. You don’t have to go along with your Pool when they do evil things. >

<What are you asking me to do?>

<Say no. Be yourself. Don’t run, perhaps, but don’t do horrible things just because it’s what people think you should do.> I was remembering the people I’d killed, some of them as a direct result of orders and some as simple casualties of the Animorph status quo.

<You’re asking me to live a blind, isolated half-life in a tank of sludge.>

<I guess I am.>

<Do you have any idea what you’re asking?>

<You won’t flee,> I pointed out, <and if we fight, it cost either both our lives or the freedom of everyone I care about. And of Karen. If you were willing to pay that price, you would have turned us in already.>

I felt my breathing steady as Aftran gathered her resolve. <You think you know everything,> she muttered in my mind. <You humans always do. But you don’t know anything. You don’t.>

After a moment, she looked at my hands and frowned. I felt her flipping through my memories for a bit. Morphing memories. <Your monkey morph isn’t working,> she pointed out.

<I don’t have a monkey morph,> I replied. <Where would I get a monkey morph? I have a _squirrel_ morph. >

She looked through the memories again. <Right. Of course.> I began to shrink.

<I don’t know why you think you’re such an expert on human psychology,> I pointed out. <Five minutes ago you didn’t believe we were people.>

<My dad… Karen’s dad, I mean… is a primary funder of The Sharing. I spent a lot of time there, convincing him to invest and stuff. I saw a lot of humans go through there.>

<The owner of Unibank takes investment advice from his tiny daughter?>

<He started listening when her recommendations started doing really well for some mysterious reason.>

<Ah. Gotcha.>

<But the thing about The Sharing? Being a part of something bigger doesn’t mean anything to humans. I mean, it doesn’t mean the _right_ thing to humans. Humans coming into the Sharing see the organisation and don’t think of themselves being a part of it, they think of it being a part of them. They act like a group is something that makes _them_ stronger, and something they can mindlessly give their time to to make themselves better. >

<That’s how human groups work,> I pointed out.

<And you wonder why we don’t think you’re people. Humans suck at groups.>

<Yeerks suck at war. You’re being held at bay mostly by teenagers, with a side order of robots who physically can’t commit violence.>

<We discovered military action after we got space travel. You’ve been a social species since before you were even humans. What’s _your_ excuse? > Fully squirrel, Aftran pulled us into the trees. I wondered why she’d chosen a squirrel instead of, say, an osprey. But I supposed that Marco would be looking for an osprey. I felt my paws scrabble and grip on the bark, felt the world lurch around my tiny body as we rose and raced along branches.

I didn’t bother to ask where we were going. I’d find out soon enough, I supposed.

<Can I just point out that for all the grief you give me about us not being all nice and social and _compassionate_ , you serve a guy who lops the heads off his subordinates for minor mistakes and likes to eat his enemies alive?>

Aftran was silent for a moment. Then she said, <Visser Three has done wonders for the yeerk people. If it were not for his military genius, my Pool, and many others, would have died in space. It is a… difficult job, to specialise so in military matters. It is difficult for such a person to share _ravhan_ , it is… difficult to remain healthy.>

My stomach would have lurched if it was listening to me. She admired him. I’d never heard even yeerks say anything good about Visser Three, and here she admired that sick freak for his ‘military genius’, for his…

No. Not admiration. <You _pity_ him. Don’t you? You pity him! >

<He has a difficult job. He is good at it, and worthy of our respect.>

<He _eats people alive_. He’s a creepy sadist and his own soldiers are afraid of him. >

<And you tear the throats from innocent slaves with your teeth,> she pointed out.

<Not because I enjoy it!>

<Then be happy that that is not what you had to become. Visser Three is what he had to be. _That_ is the meaning of the selfless self-sacrifice you love so much. >

I tried to get my head around that logic, and failed. I tried again. It did not make any more sense the second time.

<You know,> I said, <I think there might be some fundamental psychological differences between our species.>

<I would be very surprised if there were not.>

I passed the time during our little scamper through the trees by trying to come to grips with the yeerk perspective of life that Aftran had dumped in my head. It was like trying to read a very dense philosophy textbook in which key parts were written in Latin, without a translation dictionary. What was even more frustrating was that I had no idea how common any of what she’d told me was to yeerks and how much was just her. If somebody asked me to tell them how humans saw the world, I wouldn’t know where to begin. I was pretty sure only people who liked biology thought about the dance of genetic information as a normal part of their worldview, but did other people see a different thing in the same way (maybe the dance of ideology or resources or souls or something), or did different people see things entirely differently? Obviously I saw things different to Karen or nothing I had would have surprised Aftran, but was that just because Karen was young and inexperienced or were human perspectives actually very varied? What I got from Aftran had to be as biased and limited as what she got from me, and that wasn’t even accounting for the fact that I’d bias it more by trying to understand it with my own brain, through my own worldview. But it was a start.

How many aliens had dumped barely-modified bits of information directly into my mind by then? Ax, Aftran, the Controllers on Leera… it was a wonder my mind still worked at all. At least that ellimist had given me information in a form I could understand.

Eventually, we found ourselves looking down on Karen, who sat with her back against a tree hugging her knees. Ket stood guard over her, little Toby clinging to her shoulder blades. Aftran retreated a little way to demorph and morph hork-bajir instead. Then she dropped from the trees.

“Ket!” Aftran called in Jara’s gruff tones. “Cassie want you.” She pointed off into the trees, in the direction we’d come. I could see a trail there, a trail of marks and broken branches that stood out clearly in my hork-bajir sight. The trail that Jara had left when he followed us.

Ket didn’t ask questions. She didn’t stick around to wonder why we spoke English or quiz Aftran on what I supposedly wanted or wonder how they’d found me without a yeerk in my head. Her _kalashi_ had shown up to tell her that her _fellana_ needed her. So she went, pausing only to briefly tap her forehead blades against mine, and left us to guard Karen. It would be really sweet if I wasn’t so frustrated. Had she forgotten that I had a Jara Hamee morph? Did she somehow not realise that Aftran might try to deceive her? I guess it was a testament to how long we’d been fighting this war that not automatically assuming someone could be a disguised enemy was seen as a glaring mistake.

Aftran picked Karen up and dashed off into the trees. She was careful not to dig her blades into the bark and leave an obvious hork-bajir trail. We moved for some time, avoiding a couple of search parties, and finally stopped high in a tree. After settling Karen securely in the tree, we dropped to the ground briefly to pick a small pink flower, which was carefully balanced in the tree as well. Then Aftran grabbed the back of Karen’s head in one big hork-bajir claw and pressed her ear to mine.

Karen opened her mouth to scream, and Aftran pressed my hand over her mouth to stop her. I tried to pull away, tried to let the girl go, but I was powerless, unable to twitch a single muscle. Unable to open my hands and drop my arms. Unable to even turn my head just a little bit as I felt the pressure on the inside of my ear, as Aftran began to push her way out.

And she did something I hadn’t know that yeerks could even do. Even as she extruded herself through my ear, she held on to part of my brain. I felt her presence leave at first, but I still couldn’t move. Slowly, I found I could move my tail. My legs. I could breathe. But Aftran was almost all the way out of my head before she finally released contact with the last part of my brain. By the time I could move my head or arms, it was much too late. By the time I pushed Karen away, the yeerk had almost vanished into her ear.

Aftran glared at me, Karen’s tears still fresh in her eyes, as I pushed her away. <What are you doing?!> I asked, before realising I’d asked it silently and repeating myself in thought-speak. <Why? Get out of there! She’s suffered enough!>

“And she won’t suffer for much longer,” Aftran said calmly. “Because you and I are going to play a game. I can’t stop being what I am, Cassie. And you can’t stop being what you are. You ask me to give up everything. First you ask me to give up life outside the Pool, to live blind and alone, and when that doesn’t work you ask me to give up my species.” She shook her head. “You ask a lot of me, Cassie.”

I was demorphing as she spoke. My voice was a gruff mixture of Jara’s and my own human voice. “I asked you not to enslave a little girl,” I growled. “But it seems like that’s impossible.”

“Not impossible. Just hard. Very, very hard.” She looked at me sadly. “And you, born into your world of splendour, think you have the strength to just _throw it all away_. What was your plan, again? To go be a wolf, cripple yourself so you couldn’t go on missions and wouldn’t have to kill anyone, but still had sight and sound and perhaps a pack of your own and the option to come home and know that your friends, mad as they might be, would still accept you. That was it, wasn’t it? Even you couldn’t convince yourself it was noble this time, but you could convince the wolf not to care, you thought; you could give up _nothing_ to step out and here you sit there all smug and expect me to give up _everything_.” There were new tears in her eyes, running down her cheeks.

“What are we doing up here?” I asked.

“Hiding. Hiding for two hours. You ask a real sacrifice of me, so I ask one of you. One we will both need to live with.” She picked up the flower and turned it so that I could see the broad, fleshy leaf on one side with the caterpillar crawling along its surface. “You want me to live blind, helpless and tiny? Then make a real sacrifice. One you’ll have to live with, one with consequences. Tit for Tat, Cassie. That’s how the game is played, isn’t it?” She held the leaf out to me. “In two hours, I’ll find a rescue party, and Karen and I never saw the Animorphs. The identity files will be a mess after your last attack on the Pool and almost none of these rescuers would know who I actually am; with a bit of computer tampering we can have Karen walk right on out and disappear, free. After two hours, Cassie. You want peace? Peace between you and me and Karen?

“Then prove it.”


	14. Chapter 14

I stared at the leaf dangling from Karen’s trembling fingers, at the little caterpillar clinging to its surface, feeling about the air with its front legs as if trying to get a sense of what was going on. It was long, with black and yellow stripes along its body and no easily identifiable organs from my distance. I didn’t know what kind of caterpillar it was. I didn’t know how long it would live, or what its senses were like. But it looked like its world was tiny, and cut off, and helpless. Like the world of an unhosted yeerk in a silent, militarised Pool.

I wanted to laugh. I would have, if I wasn’t worried about attracting yeerk or Animorph attention. The whole thing was like some kind of elaborate test worthy of the ellimist who’d pulled that whole ‘off-planet nature reserve’ thing on us. It was like the entire universe was laughing at me. _You wanted to run away and not kill, Cassie? You wanted peace? You wanted to save Aftran and Karen? Here, have all three. As a bonus, you get a way to run away that’s actually a useful sacrifice, so the guilt won’t kill you. Go and be the idealistic martyr, Cassie. You said you’d throw your life away for the war if it came to that. Prove it. There are no excuses left. The universe has taken you at your word_.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t been a bug before. The termite and ant hadn’t worked out great, but I’d had no trouble with the fly or the spider. Maybe a caterpillar would be fun. Maybe I’d love it.

I doubted it.

But it was like my plan with the wolf, wasn’t it? It was like running off to the mountains. I just had to maintain my resolve for two hours. After two hours, I could break down, I could regret my decision, I could feel like an idiot as much as I wanted. It wouldn’t matter.

I’d run off to the forest to get trapped and lose myself anyway. The universe had just given me a brief interlude where I could save a little girl and a yeerk. It was a bonus. I should be _grateful_. So what if it was a caterpillar instead of a wolf? Why should a coward get to choose her own method of escape? If I was even remotely a good person, I wouldn’t be hesitating. I wouldn’t be looking for a way out.

I was such a hypocrite. A hypocrite and a coward and a liar, even to myself.

My hand shook violently as I reached for the caterpillar. I tried to steady it, tried to cup the animal as gently as I could and not shake it more than I had to, as I inspected its long wriggly body and disgusting little face. I focused, drew the essence of its being into me. It went still in my hand. I reached out and put it on a fresh leaf before it could rouse itself from the trance.

I met Karen’s gaze. Swallowed. “Aftran…”

She sneered. “Like I thought. Just words.”

“No! No, I’m doing it.” I swallowed again. I managed to rustle up a weak smile. “Just… just let me… I mean, it’s not supposed to be easy, right?”

I took a deep breath, savouring the scent of the forest through a human nose. I absorbed the intense green of the leaves and the blue of the sky through human eyes. And then, without closing them because I didn’t want to waste another second of humanity, I began to morph.

“If you demorph…” Aftran warned as I started to shrink.

“I won’t. I swear.” If I did, I’d not have the nerve to try again. It was now or never. One morph, two hours. I could break down later.

I felt my skin harden, my body lengthen. My legs fused together as my new shell broke into strips surrounding my body and their colour faded into alternating black and yellow. And just like that, human touch and the human sense of temperature were gone forever.

Sight went next, as my eyes dissolved and were replaced with a more basic version. The caterpillar could still see, but not well. I had a general idea of the shape of my immediate area. No more. The shape of letters, the colour of strawberry ice cream, the gloss of Midnight’s coat and the form of my mother’s smile were simple memories.

I shrank, shrank. Something soft lifted me and put me back down on something flat. I could feel some vibration, but I couldn’t hear words. I couldn’t hear music. Sound wasn’t sound any more. Taste wasn’t taste; there was _food_ and _not food_ , _poison_ and _not poison_. A small world of food below and danger above. And I was hungry. Very, very hungry.

I worked my mandibles against the leaf below me, and started to eat.


	15. Chapter 15

Broad, flat leaves. I wanted to eat leaves. I didn’t want to do much else.

I wouldn’t call the leaves delicious, exactly; the caterpillar didn’t have the kind of complex system of taste that an omnivore like a human needs. But they were right. They fed the compulsion. I pressed the very tiny antennae on my cheeks to the leaf to taste it, found it right, and ground up a portion with my mandibles. I took a step forward on my many, many legs. And then I did it again.

Bite by bite. The leaf slowly vanished. But there were more leaves. Sometimes there was danger, strange shadows above, but they always moved on without incident. Sometimes something very large would come close to me and I could feel the air pressure of its passing, and then it would be gone.

Sometimes, something strange would happen in my mind, some kind of order that wasn’t mine being briefly imposed, a strange sort of structure with a foreign flavour. It rarely lasted more than a few seconds. I thought I sort of remembered it at first, like it was something familiar. But I was too busy eating to think much on it. I had to grow. I had to be ready.

Eventually, I was ready.

I finished eating. I found a nice, sturdy twig. I started to build.

I drew silk from my body, a long, thin strand of it, and began to weave. I hooked it carefully over my chosen twig and started to build a small dome, an art a millions of years older than knitting or crochet or any primitive human imitation. I threw the silk over my anchor point over and over, making it solid, strong; I fit the end of my own body into the little dome and began to weave myself right into a garment. A home. A bunker.

A cocoon.

I piled the silk thicker and thicker around my lower body, and then moved on to my upper body, hanging upside down from my twig. No need for air holes. Nothing to fear. I was safe inside my silk shield. I closed the cocoon over my head and then, finally, I could rest.

I didn’t sleep, but I sort of… slowed down. There was pain, intense pain. It was a good pain in a way, like exercising an injured muscle, but a thousand times stronger. I couldn’t struggle against it; it was inside me, all around me. Besides, I was paralysed. The pain lessened as I lessened. It vanished from parts of me that no longer existed. My body became smaller as I was replaced with thick fluid. And then.

And then.

I stopped existing.


	16. Chapter 16

It noticed me.

I couldn’t describe it, as I was blind. I was deaf. I was nowhere and everywhere. I might have been in zero-space. I might have been somewhere else.

But it noticed me. Its attention was on me.

{We are bugged?} it asked in a language that was no language.

The other one noticed me. {Not theirs,} it concluded. {A mistake of nature. Decontaminate.}

{Should we plant it?}

{No, leave it. We have more effective projects.}

And then I came into existence again.

I was forcing my way out of my cocoon, clawing my way out towards the light that lanced into my eyes and through my mind, impossible to ignore. I levered the toughened silk away, using all my strength, and saw colour – yes, colour! – spread out before me. A landscape of sensations I didn’t remember the names for, but that I experienced in all their vivid reality. The leaves around me were outlined in a nature distinct from the flowers that bloomed in front of me, and they were distinct from the sky above and the large moving things ambling about. But the flowers were the important thing, spotlights in a world of shadows. Moving between them, one to the other, and feeding, was my focus. I would live a short life in a world of flowers.

But first, I needed to be ready. I needed to crawl fully from my cocoon. I did to, step by agonising step, dragging my body out. I walked out onto the twig I’d hung from on my new legs. I shook myself, and my wings unfurled behind me. I found a ray of sunlight to stand in, and waited for them to dry.

There was something grating in my… not my hearing, but something like it. I would have ignored it if it didn’t have a persistent edge of danger to it. But it didn’t seem to have much meaning. I searched my brain, trying to figure out what it meant. There wasn’t much in there. Vague memories of waking up, of beginning to chew my way out of my cocoon, of suddenly becoming _me_ again… that was it. It was a new brain, an almost empty brain, built from scratch within my cocoon.

I searched my _mind_ , trying to figure out what it meant.

The sensation… had been the equivalent to sound to me, once. It had been the equivalent to a specific hand sign, once. It had been the equivalent to a look from my mother, to a feeling it stirred in me, to a sense of something really, really important. What did it mean? What sound did that sensation represent? I tried to spell it out in my own mind.

Kas… see…

<Cassie!> Jake’s voice called again. <You have to demorph! Demorph now!>

De-what? It was a danger sound, but with no meaning. The Cassie was a Thing of some kind, but none of this had anything to do with predators or food or mates. It was meaningless static.

<Cassandra-Louise-Williams,> Ax said, with less danger but more force, <we believe that you may have experienced a zero-space stability disruption, depending on the level of difference between your current form and your previous one. But you must demorph quickly if you do not wish to become a _nothlit_ again. > There was a slight pause. <It is not my place to say,> he added, <but I do not wish you to be a _nothlit_ again. I know you no longer wish to go to battle with us, but our interactions are nevertheless… informative. >

Well, that meant even less than what Jake had said. I ignored it. Instead I gave my wings an experimental beat. They seemed to work.

<Cassie,> Jake said again. <Oh god, oh god, don’t go. Come back to me. Please. Don’t go. Don’t make me say goodbye to a goddamned insect.> There was a new emotion in his voice, not the danger-emotion. The danger must have passed. Good. I launched myself into the air and fluttered over to the nearest flower. Pollen tickled my legs as I dipped my proboscis into it.

<Cassie,> Rachel said. <I’m gonna kick your butt over this. Demorph so I can do it without squishing you.> Something changed in her tone; she became… quieter? Somehow? <Cassie, I’m sorry, this is my fault, I’m sorry. Don’t go. Don’t leave us like this. Just be strong and brave for a bit longer, okay? Just be strong and brave one more time. I won’t try to make you fight, I won’t try to make you into an ugly thing like me, I just… I need you to be Cassie again. Please? Please, just… just be Cassie again.>

 _Be Cassie_. Cassie was Cassie. It was an Important Thing. Not as important as the flower I was drinking. Pollen was clinging to my legs, pollen that would be too much of a bother to clean off when my focus was the delicious nectar that I drew into my probiscus.

<Cassie,> Tobias was saying. <I know it’s hard. I know it’s tempting to lose yourself. I know you’ve probably lost yourself. It’s a battle I fight every day from both sides, and I understand. But you have to keep going. You have to keep fighting. And you don’t even have to fight it from both sides like I do. You just have to be human. Be human, and it’ll all go away. Don’t let it become you, Cassie. For some of us, it’s better to be something else, we’re worth more that way, but not you. We need _you_. Fight. Remember. >

I had to find another flower. I took to the air again.

<Cassie,> Marco said, <I frankly have no idea how the hell to reach you right now, so I’m kinda just hoping you’ll be able to reach us. Sometimes it’s like that, and all you can do from the outside is maintain until someone can get back to you. But do it quick, okay? We’re on a time limit here. If you’re going to come back to us, do it quick.>

I landed on a new flower, jammed my probiscus in. Some of the pollen on my legs brushed off to fertilise it. _The butterfly moves from flower to flower, eating high-energy nectar to survive and pass on its genes. The flower provides nectar to attract the butterfly, and sticks its pollen to the butterfly’s body that it may act as a vehicle to far-away flowers for the flower’s genes. Two living robots built by genes that act in concert for a moment, although the genes themselves never interact. One step in the dance_.

<She’s so fragile,> Jake fretted. <What if she gets hurt?>

<We could find her somewhere safe,> Marco said. <A… butterfly… cage? Is that a thing?>

<The monarch butterfly lives for two to six weeks, excluding the fall generation,> Ax pointed out. <We cannot protect her from age. And I suspect that it would be cruel to cage her.>

<This would be so much easier if we knew what she wanted,> Rachel grated. <If she’s still capable of wanting anything.>

Even now, Rachel was trying to protect me. It was kind of sweet.

Protect _me_. Cassie.

Cassie. The word, the Thing. I knew it. I knew why it was important.

<Guys?> I ventured.

The response was immediate. Six mental outbursts of joy, of disbelief, of urgency. Six outpourings of intense emotion jammed right into my mind, a combined message of _It’s you!_ And _Demorph right now!_

Demorph, demorph. Focus. Had to focus.

Right, what was I focusing on? Who was I? I remembered… my animals in the barn, my teeth ripping out a throat, swimming freely in the Yeerk Pool, being trapped in a dome under the ocean. I remembered being so, so afraid as the ground around me erupted in noise and heat; not for myself, but for my _kalashi_ on the other side of the continent – would he be safe? I remembered building a treehouse with Rachel as a child. I remembered weaving my nice, safe cocoon. I remembered standing by a river and explaining to the other Animorphs that piranha actually aren’t bloodthirsty monsters. I remembered seeing for the first time, I remembered the precise sequence of codes and actions to detonate a planted set of explosives, I remembered the _ravdira_ of the yeerk homeworld being described to me and me not believing a word of it. I remembered seeing the whole world open up for me in the ellimist’s little nature show before he offered to save the human species.

<Guys, I, uh…> best just to admit it. Just to get it out. <I don’t remember how to do it. I don’t… I don’t know what to focus on.>

The response was immediate. Ax, being the most proficient with thought-speak, was the first to send me an image of a short, chubby black girl dressed in spandex, slightly distorted by his alien perspective. It was quickly added to by the others, correcting physical details and adding emotional slants. Emotion was easier to convey than visuals, at least in my experience; I couldn’t remember ever daring to attempt visuals. The image-Cassie’s lips curled into a sly smile, her hands became soft and gentle. Her eyes looked right at me, intense and open. She radiated a kind of intimidating sharpness, and I wished I could tell who put that in there because nobody in my entire life has looked my human body up and down and found me in any way _intimidating_. Although the image was static except for the edits, it had the sense that the eyes were about to move, were trying to be aware of everything all at once. Her feet were planted as if to shield somebody, her arms lifted as if preparing to cradle some small animal. The fear that I carried inside me didn’t show in the image. The blood that stained my soul didn’t stain my hands. But it did make me remember those things, remember which parts of me were actually me. I held onto them. I let them flow through me. I let them be me once more. I let myself be her.

And slowly, I began to grow.


	17. Chapter 17

For once, I was the last person to finish demorphing. Rachel immediately threw her arms around me, crushing the breath from me before I was even used to my lungs again. Jake followed suit, and I was sandwiched between the two. There was still enough room for Ax to run one hand gently over my head and down the side of my face a few times as if trying to reassure himself that I was actually there, and even Tobias landed on my shoulder to nibble at my ear like an overgrown budgerigar, staining my morphing outfit with my own blood.

Marco, loitering a little way off, opened his mouth and then closed it again. He looked mortified. After a moment, he said, “Dammit. Not a thing. Not a damn thing. Cassie basically comes back from the dead and I don’t have a single line even nearly clever enough for this situation. I’m really letting the team down here, aren’t I?”

“Nobody expects a clever line from you, Marco,” I said reassuringly. Then I grinned. “Why would we expect you to suddenly become clever now?”

Marco rolled his eyes at the lame joke. “See, that’s my problem. All my lines are that quality. I refuse to sully this occasion with such a thing.”

The others finally released me. I rubbed at my temples. I had so many notes to take, so much to write down, so much new information to add. So much important information. And I needed time to digest it all, to turn it into words. Not a lot of time. But a little.

But first things first. “I suppose you killed Karen?” I asked.

“The girl?” Marco shrugged. “She was alive, last we saw. We escorted her out of the forest with her yeerk. I was a bit worried since it’s a ridiculous security risk, but hey, we’re still here.”

“You let her live?” I asked, disbelieving. I turned my wide eyes to Jake. “You let her live? You trusted her?”

“Not one single bit,” he replied, his lip curling a little in disgust. Then his expression softened. “But I trusted you. You saw something important enough to give your life for. I wasn’t going to throw that away.”

I let the tears in my eyes run down my cheeks. There was no point in trying to hold them in. It wasn’t as if any of the other humans there had dry eyes.

I glanced around. We were out the back of the barn. Out of view, fortunately, from the house. The plant I’d woken up on was sitting in a little pot in the shade.

“Where are my parents?” I asked.

“Out until five,” Rachel said. “But they’re fine! Well, not _fine_ -fine, but they will be.”

“It’s about three-thirty now,” Marco added, providing vital context.

I nodded. “Not much time, then. Tobias, do you know where my box of notes is?”

<The one under the tree? Yes. Why?>

“Good, that saves me having to waste time showing people. You might need them. Right now, I need a pen and paper. I have to write down everything; there’s some vital information there, things that’ll change our entire understanding of the war, and you’re going to need it. I might as well put down everything I remember since we won’t get another shot at this. Can somebody get me a notebook? I don’t want to go to the house in case they come back early.”

“Don’t you want to see your parents?” Rachel asked, sounding puzzled.

“What I want doesn’t matter. The important thing is that they can’t see me. Can you imagine what that would do to them, to have me back for a moment and then lose me again? How are they supposed to make sense of that?” I shook my head. “Better to keep it simple. Let me be dead to them all along.” The words were like glass in my mouth. I forced them out anyway.

“I don’t get it,” Jake said. “What do you mean, lose you? You’re fine. Aren’t you?”

I blinked at him. “Jake,” I said, “I can’t stay. I have to morph the caterpillar again.”

Silence. For a good ten seconds.

< _What_? > Tobias asked, right as Rachel said, “The hell you do!”

I sighed. “Guys,” I said. “I didn’t get trapped by accident. I made a deal. A deal to free Karen. I’m not going to back out of it now just because I might have a chance to.”

“You’re going to give your life for this convoluted morality thing with absolutely no practical benefit,” Marco said, his voice flat and uncomprehending. “Again.”

I cocked my head. There were several things I could say in reply to that, to try to explain the practical benefit. I picked the one most likely to make sense to Marco. “How’s this for practical benefit? Aftran and I made a deal. She is in the Pool, sacrificing any chance at real freedom, keeping her silence on all our secrets, including such game-changing little details as who we are, and that technologically advanced robots who are helpless to prevent themselves from being dissected for parts live in this very town. We made a deal, her and I, a deal in good faith, sacrifice for sacrifice. So tell me, Marco, what do you think would happen if I walked into my house and hugged my parents tonight and went to school tomorrow? What do you think would happen if word of my freedom, either word of me as an andalite bandit still fighting or word of the human Cassie, ever made it back to Aftran? If she thought I’d tricked her?”

“She didn’t want you to do it,” Rachel said. “She was crying when we found her. She said she’d tried to stop you.”

Was she lying? It didn’t sound like a lie. But I knew she would, to save me. She’d lie about that sort of thing. “Are you sure?” I asked.

<She’s right,> Tobias said. <She tried to save you, and then she gave you to us. It was too late by the time we got there. And you weren’t responding to thought-speak.>

I scanned the group, trying to pick out the one least likely to lie. My gaze settled on Ax.

“Ax,” I asked. “What happened? Don’t you say anything,” I added to Jake as he opened his mouth. He shut it again. I thought. “Wait, no. Order Ax not to lie to me.”

Jake nodded once. “Ax,” he said, “tell Cassie about us finding the girl, and be honest, please. That’s an order.”

Ax lifted his tailblade slightly in an andalite salute. <After the yeerk was able to lose Marco in the forest, it took us approximately one hundred and fifty two of your Earth minutes to find you again,> he said. <Tobias located the girl Karen in a tree, apparently alone, and landed to question her. It quickly became apparent that she was once again a Controller. She had a leaf with a small Earth animal on it cupped in her hands, and was crying, claiming that she had ‘tried to stop her, but she can’t hear me; I didn’t realise she wouldn’t be able to hear me’. Tobias called in the rest of us and the yeerk explained the deal she had made with you. She claimed that she had no intention of getting you trapped, only to test your conviction. She made some sort of point about sunlight and physical corruption that made little scientific sense and we took a vote on what to do. The result was unanimous, so we immediately escorted the Controller to the nearest search party, transferred you to a plant of the same kind as the leaf you were eating, and brought you home. That was a little over twenty two of your Earth days ago.>

I looked from face to face. They looked earnest, but not deceptive.

“That’s what she wanted?” I asked. “Really?”

Everyone nodded.

I glanced at Tobias. Aftran had seen my memories. She knew that miracles did happen. She knew that to my knowledge, there’d been no way to intentionally beat the two hour limit when we’d made that deal. And the sunlight was warm on my face and I could still feel the lingering touch of my friends on my body and the smell of the animals in the barn was so real and fresh and alive.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’d better go have a shower and figure out what to say to Mum and Dad, huh?”


	18. Chapter 18

The Animorphs all offered to come with me, but I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think. In the past few days, I’d decided to throw away my entire life and intentionally trap myself as a wolf to write myself out of the fight, been forced to try to murder a prisoner to protect my friends, had my world completely overturned twice (first by confronting my own hypocrisy and then by virtue of mind-to-mind alien infodump), intentionally got myself stuck as a caterpillar instead, suffered some sort of sense-deprived hallucination while my entire body was dissolved and rebuilt, and then suddenly had my life handed right back to me.

Well, it was actually more like…. What, twenty five days? But it didn’t seem like the time in caterpillar morph counted.

Anyway, I had some adjusting to do.

I took a shower, even though I was probably the cleanest I’d been in my life apart from the blood Tobias’ affection had left on me. I felt the warm water cascade over me, its heat sinking into my muscles. I lathered soap over my body. I reminded myself that my life had things like this in it.

Then I went to my room and put on some real clothes. There were freshly washed and ironed clothed on the end of my bed, folded into neat little piles. I reached for a shirt and froze.

The way it was folded was wrong. It wasn’t folded in half down the middle like my mom usually folded things. Instead, the sleeves were folded back and the whole front visible, like a display in a clothing store. I went through the pile. They were all folded like that.

Rachel. Rachel had folded these clothes.

I got dressed quickly and dashed out into the kitchen, viewing everything with new eyes. Yes, there were little signs everywhere; about half the cups on the shelf were stacked top-down instead of top-up, the dishcloth was hung out to dry differently than normal…

I checked the freezer. It was full of containers of food, stews and soups and little lasagnes, anything that could be made at home and frozen. The containers weren’t ours. They looked an awful lot like the ones I’d seen at Marco’s place when we were preparing for the oatmeal mission.

I headed outside. The gardens and lawn were neater than I could ever remember them being. The inside of the barn was as immaculate as the inside of a barn full of sick animals could be. I had the sense that I’d cleaned it, and it took me a moment to figure out why I felt that way; all the little tools and notebooks and soforth were placed exactly as I usually placed them. Ax did that. He helped me in the barn sometimes, and since he’d not been sure what was and wasn’t important for human dwellings at first, he’d learned by pure imitation.

I sank to my knees on the clean-swept floor, and marvelled at the fact that I had any tears left to cry. But they kept coming. They just kept coming.

When I could, I got to my feet. I went inside and cleaned my face up. I prepared a cup of tea from a kitchen that was better stocked than I’d ever seen it and sat down at the dining room table to wait. And that was how Mom found me, hands cupped around a half-drunk and rapidly cooling cup of tea, ankles shuffling against each other nervously, eyes still a little swollen from crying.

She stared at me. Stared with wide eyes that couldn’t seem to comprehend what was happening, couldn’t seem to fit the image into reality, like she was afraid that I was a hallucination brought on by stress or lack of sleep that might disappear at any moment. And she looked like she definitely needed sleep.

“Hi, Cassie,” she said cautiously.

“Hi, Mom,” I replied.

And then she was across the room and around the table in three strides, pulling me up into her arms, crushing the air out of my lungs, sobbing into my shoulder. She headed straight for the phone, pulling me along with her, not letting me go as she called Dad and insisted that he had to come home right away, I was here, I was home. Half an hour later we were all seated around the table and drinking endless cups of tea while they asked me questions I couldn’t answer. What had happened? Was I alright? How had I survived? How had I found my way home? I told them that Midnight was spooked by a bear and had thrown me into the river, and left out everything else. They remarked how lucky I was to be in such good health after something like that. I brushed it off and changed the topic to one that I knew I had to address.

“Midnight?” I asked.

Both of their faces clouded over. It was Dad who spoke. “She came back with her front right leg broken in two places and her back left leg broken in three,” he said quietly.

I nodded. That meant that she was dead. Broken legs are a real problem for horses. They would have put her down immediately. Poor Midnight. She’d saved a child from a bear and death had been her reward.

I’d probably have some tears for her later, the next time I snuck out of the house to practice morphing and found myself doing it all alone. But right then I didn’t have the energy.

“But you’re back,” Dad said for about the billionth time, gripping one of my hands in his own like he was scared I’d float away. “And you’re safe.”

“I’m sorry you had to leave your meeting,” I said.

He laughed. “Don’t worry, you’re a lot more important than Unibank.”

That got my attention. “You were meeting with Unibank?”

He nodded. “The owner. He called us out of the blue a few weeks ago and offered to fund the Rehabilitation Clinic. He said one of his advisors wouldn’t stop talking about it, and she was very rarely wrong, and asked how much money we needed. Just like that.”

“So the Clinic is safe?”

“For now. We’ve been trying to hash out all the details before he moves to Los Angeles in a week or so, since it’s easier to do this stuff in person. But somehow I think he’ll forgive me for skipping out to meet up with my missing daughter.”

I smiled. So Aftran had kept her word then, and was sending Karen somewhere yeerk-free. Good. She’d be safe. We’d be safe.

“So,” Mom said with sudden exuberance, “who wants really fancy takeout to celebrate? I know this place that does amazing pork.”

“Actually, Mom,” I said, “I’ve kind of been thinking about becoming vegetarian.”


	19. Chapter 19

It was four days before my parents would let me out of their sight long enough to actually have a meeting with the Animorphs. It took some long, patient explanations of how it was impossible for me to disappear for twenty five days at the mall, but eventually they let me go. With a strict curfew. With Ax on time monitoring duty, Tobias on Ax-food-weirdness monitoring duty, and Rachel on Tobias-hawk-weirdness monitoring duty, we managed to only look slightly weird as we took a corner table and tried to eat as many chips as possible before Ax stole them from us.

“I want back in,” I said. “I want to be an Animorph.”

“Oh, good,” Marco said. “You are still as crazy as the rest of us. I was worried.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you never left,” Jake smiled.

“But,” I said, “I want to do this my way. I’m all for protecting our planet, but I’m going to stand up for what I think is right. If you decide to let me back on the team, you’re going to be dealing with that. Can you deal with that?”

“Cassie,” Rachel said, “you’ve been doing that from day one.”

“Not as often as I should,” I said quietly.

“Are we going to have a complete farce of a pretend-vote on this, or can we skip to the part where we get back to work?” Tobias asked. “We’ve got a lot to catch Cassie up on, and she said she learned some useful stuff in her Amazing Jungle Adventure. If she’s on a curfew we should get to it.”

“Forest adventure,” I corrected. “Not jungle adventure. You _live_ in the forest, how could you screw that up?”

“Well excuse me for picking the term that sounded more poetic for once,” Tobias said in a very un-Tobias-like way.

“That’s a movie title, isn’t it?” Marco asked. “Were you referencing a movie title?”

“Is that the one that was on the sci-fi channel last week?” Rachel asked. “I missed that.”

“Guys,” Jake said, “the war?”

As they managed to haul the conversation back on-topic, I watched Ax shovel the few remaining chips into his mouth. Something as simple as taste that we took for granted was amazing enough to obsess him, and for the first time, I could almost sympathise with the feeling. The memories that Aftran had shared with me lingered in the back of my mind, the joy of experiencing new and intense sensation, but for a yeerk it was nothing as simple as mere taste – the difference between an unhosted yeerk and a Controller was the difference between being a part of the world and not, between freedom and mere survival. And she had given it up. Given it up for what was right. How could I not fight, after something like that? How could I not savour every moment? How could I not do everything in my power to make the world better for anyone I possibly could?

Yes, there was blood on my hands. There was blood on all of our hands. The fight was impossible, the nightmares were as vivid as ever, and I was in constant fear of losing my friends, family, or myself to death or enslavement. But we were where we were, we had what we had, we wanted what we wanted. If I wanted a world where everybody could live in peace and comfort and freedom, I had to build it. I hadn’t found a way to deal with the nightmares and fear and drudgery, but maybe my new perspective would help me deal with it long enough to find a way. To fight. To make some kind of traction.

After all, we lived in a beautiful world.


End file.
